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 …
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