The first experimental studies in this field were devoted to the study of the influence of the presence of a group and group interaction on the course of mental processes of an individual and his behavior (N.Triplett, 1898, V.Mede, 1920, F. Allport, 1924, V.M.Bekhterev, 1925). The result of these and other studies was the discovery of the effects of social facilitation, inhibition and laziness, which explain exactly how the group and the audience influence the psychology of personality behavior. Social facilitation is an increase in the speed or productivity of an individual’s activity due to the actualization in his mind of the image (perception, representation, etc.) of another person (or group of people) acting as a rival or observer of the actions of this individual. The opposite effect is social inhibition, which implies a decrease in the productivity and quality of an individual’s activity. It has been established that the presence of an observer has a positive effect on the quantitative characteristics of activities and negatively on the qualitative ones, respectively increasing the effectiveness of relatively simple activities and making it difficult to perform difficult actions and solve complex tasks. It should be noted that the severity of the socio-psychological phenomenon of “facilitation — inhibition” largely depends on gender, age, status, role, and a number of other social and socio-psychological characteristics of the individual. [1, p.210] The history of the phenomenon of social facilitation began more than a hundred years ago, when psychologist Norman Triplett, who was interested in cycling, noticed that athletes show better results not when they “compete with a stopwatch”, but when they participate in collective races. Before making public the idea that a person works more productively in the presence of other people, Triplett conducted a laboratory experiment. The children, who were instructed to wind the line onto the reel of a fishing rod as fast as possible, performed this task faster in the presence of their co-performers than individually. [2, c.236]. As a result of numerous experiments conducted in different countries, it was found that in the presence of others, the speed and accuracy with which people perform simple examples increases. However, subsequent studies have shown that the presence of others does not always stimulate an individual to perform more effectively. It was noted that in some cases, the presence of other people negatively affects a person, and consequently, the effectiveness of performing any actions on her part. The contradictory results of the first studies of the phenomenon of “facilitation-inhibition” led to the fact that experiments in this field practically stopped for quite a long period. These studies received a new impetus thanks to the work of the social psychologist R. Zayens. He was the first to suggest that the effect of facilitation occurs in the case of simple mechanical activity, and inhibition occurs in an intellectually complex situation. In coming up with this idea, he relied on the well-known principle that arousal always enhances the dominant response. Increased arousal favors the solution of simple tasks for which the correct solution is the most likely, “dominant” reaction. People figure out simple anagrams faster when they’re excited. When it comes to performing complex tasks in which the correct answer is not so obvious, and therefore is not the dominant trend, excessive arousal increases the likelihood of a wrong decision. Excited people cope worse with solving more complex anagrams than those who are in a calm state [3, p.364]. Can this principle reveal the secret of social facilitation? Or is it more reasonable to agree with what is confirmed by many data, namely that the presence of others excites people and makes them more energetic? If social arousal enhances dominant reactions, it should favor the performance of light tasks and interfere with the performance of complex ones. In this case, the known experimental data no longer seem to contradict each other. Reeling in a fishing line, solving simple multiplication examples, as well as performing tasks related to food, are all simple actions, reactions to which are either well—learned or given to us from birth (i.e. dominate). Naturally, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the presence of strangers “spurs” us to perform well-known and learned actions. Learning new material, going through a maze, or solving complex mathematical problems are more difficult tasks, the correct responses to which are not so obvious from the very beginning. In such situations, the presence of outsiders leads to an increase in the number of incorrect answers. In both cases, the same general rule “works”: arousal favors dominant reactions [2, p.237]. The idea that the presence of other people enhances the “dominant”, i.e., the most likely reaction for a given individual, was so obvious that scientists of that time were simply surprised that they had not thought of it themselves and much earlier than Zayens. To confirm this conclusion, almost 300 studies were conducted, in which a total of more than 25,000 volunteers participated as subjects. Several experiments in which Seyens and his assistants created an arbitrary dominant reaction confirmed that the presence of observers enhances it. In one of these experiments, the researchers asked the subjects to pronounce (from 1 to 16 times) various meaningless words. Then they told them that these words would appear on the screen, one by one, and each time they would have to guess which word appeared. In fact, the subjects were shown only random black lines for hundredths of a second, but they “saw” mostly those words that were pronounced more than once. These words became the dominant reactions. Subjects who took a similar test in the presence of two other subjects were even more likely to “see” these exact words. [2, c.237] The authors of more recent studies have confirmed the conclusion that social arousal facilitates the dominant reaction, regardless of whether it is correct or not. Peter Hunt and Joseph Hillery found that in the presence of observers, students deal faster with an easy maze and longer with a difficult one. According to James Michaels and his staff, good billiard players from the Student Union (those with 71 out of 100 effective shots) showed an even higher score in the presence of 4 observers — 80% of hits in the pocket. Bad players (the number of effective shots did not exceed 36%) began to play even worse when strangers appeared near the table (the number of hits in the pocket was reduced to 25%). Athletes demonstrate well-learned skills, which explains why they perform best when they are cheered on by a crowd of fans. The results of studying the “track records” of more than 80,000 amateur and professional teams in Canada, England and the USA suggest that they win about 6 games out of 10 at home, with this indicator slightly lower for baseball and football, and slightly higher for basketball and soccer. It is possible that the advantages of being the “home team” are also related to the fact that players do not need to acclimatize or make tedious flights; in addition, they control the territory, which gives them a sense of dominance, and the cheers of the fans enhance the sense of belonging to the team [2, p.237]. It should be noted that in recent years, along with the theory of R. Zayens, other points of view on the nature and essence of the phenomenon of “facilitation — inhibition” have become widespread. One of them is the so-called distraction/conflict model. This model is based on the idea that the presence of other people always attracts our attention, resulting in an internal conflict between two main trends that manifest themselves in almost any situation of public activity.: 1) pay attention to the audience and 2) pay attention to the task itself. This conflict can increase arousal, which further helps or hinders the task, depending on whether its correct solution is associated with a dominant reaction or not. In addition, such a conflict can cause cognitive overload if the efforts required to pay attention to a difficult task and other people exceed the level of the individual’s cognitive abilities. Moreover, the manifestation and severity of the phenomenon of “facilitation — inhibition” depends on a number of factors. From a purely socio-psychological point of view, the influence of the level of group development is of particular interest in this regard. As practice shows, in groups with a high level of socio-psychological type of development, the presence of others and interaction with them has a pronounced facilitating effect in the process of their complex intellectual activity. This is especially evident when working on problematic tasks that do not have not only an obvious, but also the “only right” solution and require a creative approach. Moreover, as recent research in the field of management psychology shows, in modern conditions, having a full-fledged team is not only useful, but often an absolutely necessary condition for finding effective solutions to such problems [3, p.365]. So, according to the basic principles of social psychology and group psychology, it is obvious that we react to the presence of other people. But does their presence really excite us and what are its consequences? If a person feels heavy at heart and is tormented by sad thoughts, a friend who happens to be nearby at that moment can listen and help comfort the excitement and pain. However, in the presence of strangers, a stressed person sweats more, gets nervous, and strains. Even a friendly audience can cause poor performance of duties that require full commitment from a person. I can confirm from my own experience that in stressful situations, the audience only makes the situation worse. Before going to university, I studied at a music school for 9 years. When taking exams and during concerts, the more people there were in the hall, the more difficult it was for me to calm my excitement and overcome the fear of making a mistake or forgetting a piece. Naturally, when I was playing in the presence of a smaller and more “familiar” group of people, such thoughts never crossed my mind. In many cases, the large audience and the excitement caused by their presence lead to problems implementing even automated skills such as speech. Under extreme pressure, we can very easily start stuttering, forgetting words, confusing sentences, etc. Each of us will be able to recall a similar case from our practice when we had to speak in front of a large audience, and because of the excitement, we forgot much of what we wanted to say. That is why many public figures prepare mini-notes in advance, so that if anything happens, they can peek and remember what they were planning to talk about. So far, it has been said that if you have any skills, then the presence of an audience will “spur” you to demonstrate your skills, or if you are overexcited and too concerned about how and what you are doing, on the contrary, reduce the effectiveness of your actions. However, what is already difficult for you in everyday life may be impossible in such circumstances. Why does the presence of strangers excite us and lead to such consequences? There are three possible causes, and each of them has experimental confirmation. 1. Fear of evaluation. According to Nicholas Cottrell, observers make us uneasy because we care about how they evaluate us. To test his hypothesis and prove the existence of fear of evaluation, he and his colleagues repeated the experiments of Zayens and Sayles with meaningless syllables at the University of Kent, adding a third condition to them: observers. In one case, the observers were blindfolded, ostensibly to prepare them for an experiment to study perception, while others simply sat and stared at the subjects. As a result of this experiment, it turned out that, unlike the “sighted” audience, blindfolded observers did not influence the actions of the subjects. Cottrell’s conclusions have been confirmed by other researchers: the reinforcement of dominant reactions is maximized when people think they are being evaluated. In one experiment conducted on a treadmill in Santa Barbara, joggers from the University of California, running past a woman sitting on the grass, increased their speed if she was looking at them, and did not do so if she was sitting with her back to them. Fear of evaluation also helps to explain why: — people work better if their co-executors are slightly superior to them.; — arousal decreases when a group that includes people with high status is “diluted” by those whose opinion we do not value.; — observers have the greatest influence on those who are most concerned about their opinion.; — the effect of social facilitation is most noticeable when we are unfamiliar with the observers and it is difficult for us to keep track of them. The embarrassment we feel when we’re judged can also prevent us from doing what we do best automatically, without thinking. For example, if basketball players think about how they look from the outside and analyze all their movements during crucial free throws, they will most likely miss. 2. Distraction. Glenn Sanders, Robert Baron, and Danny Moore developed the idea of fear of evaluation and went a little further. They suggested that if people think about how their co-executors work, or how the audience reacts, their attention is distracted. The conflict between the inability to distract oneself from others and the need to focus on the work being done, being too heavy a burden for the cognitive system, causes arousal. Evidence that people are actually aroused by distraction comes from experiments that have shown that social facilitation can be caused not only by the presence of another person, but also by inanimate objects, such as flashes of light. 3. The fact of the observer’s presence. Zayens believes that even without fear of evaluation, and without distraction, the very fact of the observer’s presence can cause arousal. For example, in one experiment, subjects more specifically named their favorite colors in the presence of observers. When performing such tasks, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers that observers can evaluate, and therefore there is no reason to worry about what opinion they will have. Nevertheless, the presence of strangers is “electrifying” [2, pp.239-240]. It can be concluded that people react to each other’s presence unconsciously, and the factors determining the degree of reaction are the following: 1. The number of people around you. The influence of other people on an individual and his activities increases with an increase in their number. A person gets much more excited when surrounded by a large number of people. Being massive increases arousal, which exacerbates the dominant reaction.; 2. The relationship of liking or disliking within the group. Finding a person in a circle of people who are sympathetic to her, or vice versa, are not sympathetic, in its own way affects the degree of her arousal and the effectiveness of her activities. Naturally, when interacting with people who like each other, the effectiveness and efficiency of their interaction is much higher than in groups with relationships of antipathy. 3. The importance of people around you for a person. Social arousal and the degree of social facilitation and/or inhibition directly depend on the importance of the people around them – the more significant they are, the greater the degree of arousal and excitement, and vice versa. 4. The degree of spatial proximity between people. Social arousal is stronger the closer people are to each other [4, p.99]. In addition to the effects of social facilitation and inhibition discussed above, there is also a third one – social laziness. Social laziness is explained by the tendency of people to make less effort when they join forces for a common goal, rather than in the case of individual responsibility. The same principle applies: when observation increases the fear of evaluation, the result will be social facilitation or inhibition; when being lost in a crowd reduces the fear of evaluation, the result will be social laziness [4, p.104]. Almost a hundred years ago, French engineer Max Ringelmann discovered that collective efforts do not exceed even half the sum of the maximum possible individual efforts. Contrary to popular belief that “there is strength in unity,” it follows that group members may actually be less motivated when performing a collective task [4, p.99]. It is possible, of course, that low productivity is the result of poor coordination of common actions. However, a group of scientists from Massachusetts, led by Alan Ingham, conducted an experiment during which she cunningly clarified this issue — the subjects thought that others were pulling the rope with them, but in fact they were working alone. When the subjects knew that they were pulling alone, they developed 18% more effort than when they thought that two to five people were helping them from behind. At the Ohio State Institute, researchers Bibb Latane, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins tried to find other methods to study this phenomenon, which they called social laziness. They noticed that the noise generated by the six participants in the experiment when they were asked to “applaud and shout as loudly as possible” was only a little over two times higher than the potentially maximum noise generated by one person. In this case, as in the case of tug of war, the question also arose that the effectiveness in creating noise could decrease due to poor coordination of actions, and not because of the effect of social laziness. Therefore, Latane and his colleagues followed Ingham’s example, making the subjects believe that they were making noise and clapping with others, although in fact they were doing it alone. Political scientist John Sweeney, interested in the political consequences of social laziness, obtained similar experimental results at the University of Texas. He found that the students pedaled the stationary bike more intensively (judging by the electrical output) if they thought that the experimenters were watching each of them individually, and not just summing up the power developed by all the “cyclists”. As a result, it was concluded that in the context of group actions, people usually tend to shirk work. In these and about 160 other experiments, we can trace the manifestation of one of the psychological forces that cause social facilitation — the fear of evaluation. In experiments on social laziness, people tend to believe that they are appreciated only when they act alone. With group actions (tug of war, standing ovation, etc.), the fear of evaluation decreases. When people are not responsible for the end result and cannot evaluate their own contribution, responsibility is shared among all members of the group. On the contrary, in experiments on social facilitation, people are more likely to be evaluated from the outside. Once in the center of attention, they conscientiously control their behavior [2, pp.242-243]. Thus, the same principle applies: when observation increases the fear of evaluation, the result will be social facilitation; when being lost in a crowd reduces the fear of evaluation, the result will be social laziness. For example, we know from history that under the communist regime, peasants on Russian collective farms worked in one field or another and had virtually no personal responsibility for a particular piece of land. Small private plots were left to them for their own needs. According to one study, these private plots generally occupied only 1% of the land suitable for cultivation, but produced 27% of all Soviet agricultural products. In Hungary, private plots occupied 13% of the land, yielding one third of the output. In North America, workers who do not pay union dues and do not work on a voluntary basis are nevertheless willing to take advantage of union benefits. The same thing happens to public television viewers who are slow to respond to fundraising campaigns for the TV studio. This suggests another possible explanation for social laziness. When the reward is divided equally, regardless of personal contribution, each participant receives a higher reward per unit of their efforts if they are parasitic. Thus, people may be motivated to mess around if their contributions are not evaluated and rewarded individually [2, p.244]. But, of course, collective efforts do not always lead to their weakening. Sometimes the goal is so significant and it is so important that everyone makes every effort, that the team spirit causes and supports real zeal. A number of evidences convince us that this is indeed the case. People in the group are less idle if the task is defiantly difficult, attractive and exciting. Collectively solving a difficult and interesting task, people can perceive their own contribution as irreplaceable. Groups are much less idle if their members are friends and not strangers to each other. Therefore, the following factors of social laziness can be clearly distinguished: -the presence of individual responsibility for the results of their work. The higher the responsibility, the lower the social laziness.; -group cohesion and friendly relations. People in groups are less idle if they are friends and not strangers to each other.; -the size of the group. The larger the group size, the higher the social laziness.; – cross-cultural differences. Members of collectivistic cultures show less social laziness than members of individualistic cultures; – gender differences. Women are less likely to show social laziness than men [4, p.104]. So, although social laziness does manifest itself every now and then when people work together and do not bear individual responsibility, it is still impossible to say that the more hands there are, the less work done. In conclusion, it should be noted that today, the phenomena of social facilitation, inhibition, and laziness are relevant, important, and necessary topics for study and cognition not only by psychologists, but also by people in other professions. Knowing the specifics and subtleties of these phenomena can help many people find levers of control over both their own behavior and the behavior of other people, and spur them at the right moment to achieve the most productive results. Author: N. N. Alieva Photo: morganhomes.com