Cottrell claimed that people experience this in
the presence of others and think that they are
evaluating our performance
this causes arousal and results in
performance being enhanced
Bartis et al 1988
wanted to see if evaluation apprehension would
lead to improvement of performance on simple
tasks and inhibit performance on complex tasks
asked one group to list uses
of knives and another to list
creative uses of knives
some people were told
their performance
would be identified
those performing the simple task produced more uses in the
evaluation apprehension condition and those performing the
complex task performed worse in this condition
evaluation apprehension increases performance
of simple tasks and decreases performance of
complex tasks