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Summary Theme 5 Social Psychology Notes
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These are the notes for Theme 5 of the Social Psychology course.
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THEME 5What is a group?
Group: 1) collection of 2 or more individuals
2)face-to-face interaction
3)aware of their membership to the group
4)aware of other's membership
5)aware of interdependence as they strive to achieve goals
Social Facilitation
• Social Facilitation (old theory) by Norman Triplett in 1898 focused only on the positive effects
and the data collected was analyzed thoroughly after a while, proved not very strong support of
his hypothesis and ended up regarded as a myth.
• Social Facilitation (new theory) was revived by Zajonc in 1965 stated that the presence of others
increases arousal which affects our performance (positively or negatively) depending on the
difficulty of the task.
o This new theory focuses on how affected is the dominant response to a task, not the task
itself.
Zajonc 3 step process:
Audience effects = the effect of the presence of an audience on our performance.
Factors which can affect our performance:
• mere presence of others;
• if the audience is paying attention to us or not;
, • if the audience is well versed enough to evaluate our performance (Evaluation-apprehension
Theory);
• attentional overload (Distraction-conflict Theory);
• difficulty of task (automatic and easy or hard and needs attention to details);
• concern with self-presentation (if the task is easy then performance goes up, if the task is hard
and we have chances of making errors then performance will decrease and we will feel
embarrassed);
• arousal towards audience;
• relationship to the audience;
• self-awareness theory (we compare our actual performance level to our ideal one and if the
distance is small, we become motivated, if the gap is too big, we become discouraged and
performance levels drop);
Drive Theory (Zajonc, 1965) states that the physical presence of others instinctively causes arousal that
motivates performance of habitual behavior patterns.
Evaluation-apprehension Theory (EAT)/Model (Nickolas Cottrell, 1972) states that performance can
increase or decrease in the presence of others who can evaluate it. (audience also has to pay attention)
Physical presence causes drive, because people have learned to be apprehensive when being evaluated.
>> Good (easy task > social reward) >>> Performance Increase
Social Presence >>> Evaluation Apprehension >>
>> Bad (hard task > social punishment) >>> Performance Decrease
Distraction-conflict Theory (DCT) (Glen Sanders, 1981, 1983) states that the presence of others causes
us to divide out attention between the task and attending to the audience which leads to attentional
conflict.
Also works for: flashing lights, movement, noise, even a blind audience.
Drive + Distraction = impair performance of a difficult task, but for an easy one, drive overtakes
distraction and performance improves on easy tasks.
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