Desert Island Social Influence PSYB 2 Social Influence

Desert Island

Social Influence PSYB 2

Social Influence ‘Efforts by one or more individuals to change the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions or behaviours of one or more others’ (Baron et al, 2006) Social influence can be a real or imagined pressure….

Social Influence Social facilitation Conformity Obedience Defiance ETHICS AND METHODOLOGIES

Social Facilitation …where the performance at a task or a sport is affected by the mere presence of other people, and this performance can either be enhanced or made worse….

Triplett (1898) Published one of the first experiments in social psychology. He observed how cyclists produced faster times when performing in pairs than when alone.

Triplett (1898) In pairs read the study on the sheet provided and then answer as many questions as possible on the little A 5 cards provided. AIM METHOD RESULTS CONCLUSION EVALUATION

Task 1 st Everyone write ‘I LOVE PSYCHOLOGY’ 10 times

Task 2 nd Now the (someone comes to board) Write it backwards 10 times

However… Sometimes the presence of others can make performance worse. Allport (1924) did a number of experiments where participants would work alone in cubicles or alongside others. He found that when the task was simple, i. e. crossing out vowels in words the performance was best in front of others. However when the task was more complicated, i. e. solving complex problems, performance was better when working alone.

Contradictory evidence…. Dashiell (1930) found that the number of arithmetic problems performed by participants increased in the presence of others but so did the number of errors made. Schmitt et al (1986) found that participants typed their name faster in the presence of others but did best alone when asked to type their name backwards. The same results have been found in animal studies where simple mazes are worked out faster when in the presence of other animals whilst complex mazes are done better when alone. (Zajonc et al, 1969)

Recap Write a quick summary for each below, then make up a mnemonic for all the researchers…. Social Influence Social Facilitation Triplett Allport Dashiell Schmitt Zajonc

Explanations for social facilitation Theories and studies to support

Explanations for contradictory findings 1. 2. 3. 4. Zajonc (1965) dominant response theory Study to support (Michaels et al, 1982) Zajonc’s drive theory of social facilitation Cottrell’s (1972) Evaluation apprehension theory 5. Study to support (Bartis et al, 1988) 6. Saunders (1983) Distraction – conflict theory 7. Study to support (Saunders et al, 1978)

Group work-15 mins Each group must produce some sort of A 3 poster displaying your newly learned information in one of the following ways: A mind map A flow diagram A storyboard A chart A key word plan Overlapping circles A graph Ranked bullet points Or anything else you choose

Presentation Explain to class in a nutshell what theory/study is about. and How it relates to social facilitation

Homework for next lesson. . I want you to produce a handout for your class mates using ICT based on what you have learned. This handout will be given to each member of the class. You must prepare some sort of quiz based on that Information which your classmates will complete i. e. crosswords, word searches, blockbusters, who wants to be a millionaire style Questions, true/false game etc Or you could produce at least 5 exam style questions based on that information

Explanations for social facilitation Continued and evaluations…

Real life application SPORTS Playing golf is a skilled task. What would happen to your arousal levels if you had never played before and people were watching? What would your performance be like? This applies to any skilled sport, i. e. ice skating, high jump, etc…

Real life application WORKPLACES Aiello and Kolb (1995) showed how highly skilled workers performed better when monitored, whereas unskilled performed worse. This again could be explained as others may cause distraction or enhance a persons fear of evaluation. Thus we must only do simple tasks when in the presence of others. Mac. Cracken and Stadulis (1985) found that the presence of an audience had little effect on children (under 8 yrs)…. why do you think this?

Evaluation 1 Researchers have challenged the idea that it is arousal alone which explains social facilitation. It is now thought that both arousal and cognitive processes such as attention are involved.

Evaluation 2 It may be that arousal is a result of the cognitive thoughts someone has after paying attention to the task and the audience. This may cause reduced or narrowed attention to the task.

Evaluation 3 Wicklund (1975) offered a different explanation centred in around self-awareness. He proposed that when in front of other people, the immediate response is to focus on oneself. This then causes the person to compare how he or she would perform ideally with how they actually perform. If there is a significant difference between the ideal and reality, the person tries to perform to their ideal. This will work on easy tasks but not on complex tasks which have not been learned.

Evaluation 4 Social psychologists have offered a number of different explanations for social facilitation, but after more than a hundred years of research, no one explanation has been agreed by all psychologists.

Evaluation 5 There a number of criticisms of the research. First, audiences in experiments tend to be passive and simply observe someone performing the task. Real audiences are often noisy and judge behaviour, for example at Wimbledon centre court! Therefore many of the tasks performed are artificial and so lack ecological validity. Second, research has largely ignored the personality differences between individuals, for example Triplett (1898) found that 25% of participants showed worse than better performance when in front of an audience.