Effects of the presence of others- from task performance to behavior in crowds PDF

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Summary

Mind maps of some course work for Organizational Communication. It is mostly on unit 3, detailing and pointing out the things students should focus on....

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Perhaps much more surprising is the fact that often, we are strongly affected by the mere presence of others, even if we're not part of a formal group.

The fact that our behavior is often strongly affected by the groups to which we belong is far from surprising; after all, in these groups they are usually wellestablished norms that taught us how we are expected to behave.

Effects of the presence of others: from task performance to behavior in crowds

We are often affected by the mere physical appearance of others.

Social facilitation: performing in the presence of others

Often the mere presence of other people, even if they are total strangers, can you influence our behavior.

Evidence from several different studies confirm that the presence of others can affect our performance-sometimes (+) & sometimes (-).

we change from casual slouching and having our feet on the furniture to a more “socially acceptable” posture.

Can having an audience distract us?

Zonjonc et al (1969) conducted a seemingly experiment, where they arranged to have cockroaches running maze.

They also constructed clear boxes close enough to the maze so that a Roach “audience” could observe the maze running “participants”

Some have suggested that the presence of others either as an audience or as coactors, can be distracting and, for this reason it can produce cognitive overload.

With the set up the roaches in the maze would also know they're being watched- “they” would be aware of the presence of onlooking audience. Because performance must divide the attention between the task and the audience, such increase cognitive load can result in a tendency to restrict one’s attention so as to focus only on essential cues or stimuli while “screening out” non-essential ones.

Several findings offer support for this view known as the distraction conflict theory.

Hetherington et al (2006) (pp. 392)

As it turns out those roaches who watched by other roaches ran the maze faster than cockroaches without an audience. The researchers were intent on making a point about group phenomenon called social facilitation- that is the effect of the presence of others on performance.

The researchers also noted that the presence of others increases physiological arousal and as a result any dominant response will be facilitated. This means that we can focus better on something we know or have practiced when we are aroused but that same physiological arousal will create problems when we're dealing with something new or complex.

However other researchers thought that performance might sometimes be disrupted by the presence of an audience because of apprehension about having their performance evaluated. The evaluation apprehension idea was studied by Conttrel et al (1968). In fact, several of their experiments found that social facilitation did not occur when an audience was blindfolded or displayed no interest in watching the person performing the task, which lends support to the interpretation that concerns about evaluation might play a role.

This reasoning is known as the drive theory of social facilitation because it focuses on arousal or drive based effects on performance. The presence of others will improve individual’s performance when they are highly skilled at the task in question but will interfere with performance when they are not highly skilled for instance when they are learning to perform it....