When being sucky turns into being a BAMF: The two sides to social facilitation

After reading the chapter for this week, the concept that I could readily illustrate with a personal, vivid experience was social facilitation.  According to Zajonc’s (1965) Social Facilitation Theory, the presence of others increases an individual’s performance on tasks that are easy or have been mastered but decreases an individual’s performance on tasks that are difficult or novel.  Specifically, the presence of others elicits arousal in an individual, which then facilitates a dominate response.  In turn, this dominate response can either lead to an increase or a decrease in performance levels depending on the ease of the task the individual is trying to complete (Zajonc, 1965).  That is, if the task is generally easy for everyone or is specifically easy for you (i.e., you’re a bossat it), your dominate response is to do well on that task.  Therefore, you perform even better in front of a crowd because the presences of others heightens this dominate response.  By contrast, when a task is considered to be generally difficult or is specifically difficult for you (e.g., you just started learning a new skill), your dominate response is to not do so well on the task.  As a result, you tend to perform poorly in front of an audience because the presences of others heightens this dominate response (Zajonc, 1965).

One of my behaviors that I think illustrates the two sides of this theory is my participation in the school band from sixth grade to twelfth grade.  In sixth grade, there was a morning and an afternoon class for band.  I was placed in the afternoon class, which was fine with me.  However, when we chose the instrument that we would be learning to play, I quickly realized that I was the only flute player in my class period.  Being the only flute player didn’t become a problem until our director made me play a certain scale or part of a song in front of everyone.  The director usually had everyone play a part individually at some point, but it was worse for me because I had no one else to share in my misery as a flute player.  During these moments, I was a nervous wreck.  My breath came out all shaky, my hand would sort of tremble as I played each note, and I could feel myself becoming flushed as I progressed through my piece of music.  I never experienced these types of responses when I practiced at home, alone in my room; therefore, I knew that they were caused by having to play in front of my peers.  Furthermore, because I had never touched a flute before the sixth grade, I wasn’t the greatest flute player, so not being able to play very well was my dominate response to this task.  Taken together, these factors created the perfect condition for social facilitation such that the presence of my band peers caused me to become physiologically aroused, which then elicited my dominate response of not being able playing well.  In other words, during these moments I generally did not play loudly enough or I played a certain rhythm wrong because I was performing a somewhat novel task in front of an audience.  The worst part of these experiences was that the director would never take pity on me.  Instead, I was required to play a specific part until I got it right or I played loudly enough.


I realize now that this wasn’t some form of torture, but rather techniques that the director needed to use in order for me to become a better flutist.  Interestingly enough, during the later years of my band experience, I became less of a nervous wreck when the director had us individually play a piece of music.  In fact, during my sophomore year in marching band, I played the piccolo and had a duet with a saxophone in the song, ‘Summer Loving’, from the motion picture Grease.  The adrenaline rush I got from playing in front a lot of people continued to increase every football game, so that by the time we performed our show at the marching band competition, I gave the best damn performance of my life.  We ended up receiving 1s on our show from all of the judges, which is the best score a marching band can receive.  Now, I’m not saying that we got a high score solely because of me, but I do know that our score was partly due to the fact that I didn’t suck.  Had I performed poorly the judges would have made specific comments on their score sheet about the piccolo player; however, their comments reflected that fact that they enjoyed the duet (i.e., I did not suck).  In the end, I am thankful that I was able to overcome the somewhat negative side of social facilitation and benefit from the more positive side of the theory.

n = 813   
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Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.