Audience effect (social psychology)

An audience effect is a change in a person’s performance or behavior caused by other people’s presence. Its direction depends on the task, the performer’s experience, and how the audience is perceived.

Social facilitation: The tendency for the presence of others to improve performance on well-learned tasks and impair it on difficult or unfamiliar tasks. This pattern explains why an audience can help or hinder performance.
Norman Triplett: An American psychologist whose 1898 study of cyclists and children is often cited as an early social facilitation experiment. His cycling observations helped establish performance in others’ presence as a research question.
Social presence: The experience or condition of other people being physically or psychologically present. An audience effect begins with the presence of other people, whether or not they interact.
Social inhibition: A reduction in performance caused by the presence of other people. It names the impairing side of audience effects, especially on difficult or unfamiliar tasks.
Drive theory of social facilitation: A theory that social presence raises arousal, strengthening dominant responses and shaping performance accordingly. It links an audience’s presence to arousal and the response most likely to occur.
Ringelmann effect: The decline in individual effort as group size increases during a shared task. This group-performance finding contrasts audience enhancement with reduced individual effort.
Dominant response: The response most likely to occur in a given situation, often because it is habitual or well learned. Arousal tends to strengthen this response, which may help easy tasks and hurt difficult ones.
Conformity: The adjustment of beliefs or behavior to align with a group’s norms or perceived expectations. Conformity changes behavior toward group norms, whereas audience effects concern presence-linked changes.
Evaluation apprehension: Concern about being judged by others, which can alter behavior and performance. The expectation of judgment can make an audience more influential than mere presence.
Robert Zajonc’s cockroach experiments: Experiments showing that cockroaches ran a simple maze faster but a complex maze slower when other cockroaches were present. The results demonstrated that audience effects depend on task difficulty, even in nonhuman animals.

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EmbarrassmentRelated: The size and nature of an audience can alter embarrassment even when the act is unchanged.