Group Performance

What'a Group performance (Lecture)? [AIM]- Effects of Bystanders > whether they improve or impair someone's performance- Group performance vs. individual member performance

Support the notion of Social facilitation using studies, theories and examples (5 marks)? * Zajonc (1965) - DRIVE THEORY !- proposed the drive theory to help explain social facilitation -Social facilitation such as, explain what determines whether social presence (i.e. passive audience) facilitate or inhibits performance. - Drive theory argues that people are relatively unpredictable. BUT the presence of others, causes us to be in a state of alertness and readiness. - increased arousal or motivation is therefore an instinctive reaction to social presence. - Such arousal functions as a 'drive' that energies (i.e. causes us to enact) that behaviour which is our dominant response (i.e. best learned, most habitual) in that situation.:) If the dominant response is correct (we feel the task is easy) then social presence produces an improved performance:( if the dominant response is incorrect (we feel the task is difficult) then social presence produces an impaired performance.(Look at the diagram below)Application of this theory: For example, you play piano alone and you find it extremely easy because it is very well learned and you almost make no mistake. Drive theory therefore predicts that if you had to play a piano piece in front of your friends or audience. Your dominant response is to make no mistake. Hence your performance would be greatly improved. However, if you find it extremely difficult to play piano alone because it is not very well learned. Thus, you almost never get it right. Drive theory would predict that because the dominant response contains all sort of errors, chances are your performance would be truly terrible.

Definitions What does Social-facilitation mean? (2 marks) An improvement in the performance of well-learned/ easy tasks and a deterioration in the performance of poorly learned/difficult tasks in the mere presence of members of the same species aka HUMANS! What does audience effects mean? (1 mark)Impact on individual task performance of the presence of others What does Conspecifics mean? (1 mark)Members of the same species

Group to a certain degree influence someone's behaviour. Discuss this using studies (4 marks).* Norman Triplett (1898) - Competition - Observed that people would cycle faster when paced than when alone & even faster when in competition than when paced. - Therefore hypothesised that competition between people energised and improved performance on motor tasks. - He had young children reeling a continuous loop of line on a 'competition machine' and this confirmed his hypothesis- He found that more children reeled the line more quickly when racing against each other in pairs than when performing alone. - Therefore this shows that competing against others in a group can enhance and improve performance.[!] Criticism - Floyd Allport (1920) - Triplett's narrowing of the effect to competition could be widened. *Allport (1920) - Presence NOT competition- Allport suggested that in Triplett's study... improvement in performance can be due to the presence of of conspecifics as coactors (doing the same thing but not interacting) or passive audience (passively watching).