John Innes

Social facilitation: The early history of social facilitation

This chapter reviews the history of research into social facilitation, which has a long tradition extending back to 1898. Figure 1 shows a cumulative record of all the social facilitation studies from 1898 up to 1983. The major seminal papers on social facilitation were written in 1898 by Norman Triplett, in 1920 by Floyd Allport, and by Robert Zajonc in 1965. Figure 1 shows the increase in publications which occurred immediately after those papers. There are a number of points which will be emphasized throughout this chapter about the historical development of social facilitation research. They will be made here first. (1) The first point is that the definition of social facilitation keeps changing. In the very early work the term was not used at all. Allport (1924a) coined the term to refer to effects of the ‘sight and sound’ of another person doing the same activity (now called co-acting or co-working ). Later the term was used for the effects of an audience as well. In the work with animals the term referred to many other processes including imitation . One reason that ‘social facilitation’ kept changing its meaning was that the field of social psychology was developing rapidly during this period. Indeed, the first social facilitation experiment has often been called the first social psychological experiment. As social psychology changed so did the terminology and the topics of interest. In tracing these changes we will, in fact, trace the whole development of the discipline: from the early work based on German educationalists; through the introduction of experimental methods; to modern experimental social psychology.

Social facilitation: Social facilitation effects in animals

Introduction It may be asked: why is there a chapter on non-human animals (called ‘animals’ from here on) in a book on social facilitation? There are five answers to this. First, the early literature made great use of animal experiments after about 1930, especially within comparative psychology. This was not discussed in Chapter 2 but left till now. So a full understanding of the early arguments about social facilitation requires a look at this extensive literature. Second, Zajonc (1965) included a lot of animal studies in his major review which was outlined in Chapter 3, and this triggered a lot more animal research after 1965. This was probably helped by the fact that the methodology was so clearly set out that it could be easily applied to animals. Many experiments looking for the social facilitation interaction effect were conducted. A third reason for including animals is that the theories given in Chapter 5 suggest that animals will not be affected by evaluation apprehension and social conformity. Therefore, if social facilitation effects can be shown with animals, it would mean that social conformity is not a necessary condition for mere presence effects. This would mean that the mere presence idea has some merit. The fourth reason for including animals is that the mere presence effects discussed in Chapter 4 suggest that such effects would be more important in non-human animals than in humans. Some of the fear reactions of animals have been discussed there, and these reactions seem easier to demonstrate in animals.