Research Design Connection: Audiences and Performances

Having someone able to see what we’re doing is sometimes a good thing and sometimes not. Yu and Wu “investigated whether the mere presence of a human audience would evoke a social facilitation effect in baggage X-ray security screening tasks.” They confirmed the social facilitation effect: “The presence of a human audience facilitated the search performance of simple tasks and inhibited the performance of complex tasks.” The moral: the complexity of what we’re doing should align with whether or not others can see what we’re up to.

Rui-feng Yu and Xin Wu. 2015. “Working Alone or in the Presence of Others: Exploring Social Facilitation in Baggage X-Ray Security Screening Tasks.” Ergonomics, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 857-865.

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.