Chib, Adachi and O’Doherty have confirmed the existence of social facilitation. They report that “Throughout our lives we must perform tasks when being observed by others. Previous studies have shown that the presence of an audience can cause increases in an individual’s performance as compared to when they are not being observed – a phenomenon called ‘social facilitation’…We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity while healthy human participants performed a skilled-task during conditions in which they were paid based on their performance and observed and not observed by an audience…[our] findings illustrate how neural processing of social judgments gives rise to the enhanced motivational state that results in social facilitation of incentive-based performance.” The outcomes describe by Chib and colleagues result when people are doing a simple or well-rehearsed task and are reversed when people are being observed and doing a new or more difficult one. Participants in the Chib-lead study were playing a simple video game.
Vikram Chib, Ryo Adachi, and John O’Doherty. “Neural Substrates of Social Facilitation Effects on Incentive-Based Performance.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy024
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.