Nervous Cockroaches

One of the most striking Research Studies that I encountered in my Undergraduate Social Psychology year was the work by Robert Zajonc. It, like most seminal works in Psychological Research elicits the response "Oh, I could've told you that!" or "That's just common sense!"

So what did the guy do? Rather, who did he do it on?


72 lovely cockroaches were recruited to run on a race track of sorts (easy) as well as in a maze (difficult).

Another variable introduced into the proceedings was the presence or absence of an eager audience (cockroaches again).

The Roaches were then made to run either in the company of conspecifics (fancy word - identical species) or by themselves.

Results

It was found that the mere presence of other roaches hurt the running times of the antennae sporting athletes, whether it was in the audience stand or alongside on the maze.
However, exactly reverse findings were registered when the difficult maze was substituted with a runway track. Here, the presence of conspecifics on the track or as audience actually resulted in better performance ('facilitation').

Zajonc concluded these results as confirmation of his drive theory centered social facilitation. In Psychology, Drive refers to any state of deprivation. This state of deprivation (physiological - like hunger etc, or psychological - ambition/desire for achievement) leads to actions that seek to reduce this drive or state of inequillibrium. More specifically, it was proposed that presence of an audience or co-participants resulted in an increased state of arousal. This increased arousal aids what Zajonc refers to as 'dominant responses' and impairs 'non dominant responses'. Simply put, think about these as indicators of task simplicity. A dominant response in this experiment was running along a straight, simple track and these are facilitated in the presence of others. The non dominant response would generally require some additional cognitive effort and in this experiment this was the complicated maze where performance was impaired in the presence of additional participants and audience.

What does it all mean? Are there any applications of this today?

You tell me.
Think about the boat races. In an indoor practice gig, how do you think the rowing times of a single rower, rowing in isolation would compare to the times recorded when his Crew joins him? Or reminisce back to your Science projects in school - did you work/research harder when you and you alone were responsible for the output or when you were part of a team with 5 of your best friends?

You know what Social Facilitation would say. Just to complicate things further, read about another phenomenon - Social Loafing and reconsider your answers. Social loafing is described as a decrease in individual effort due to the social presence of others (Latane et al. 1979). Essentially individual effort decreases as the group size increases. In one study, subjects were asked to clap and shout in a large group and alone. The average sound amplitude produced by groups of different sizes was significantly less than the levels produced by each individual participant. This difference increased with an increase in group size. (Latane, Williams and Harkins, 1979). The most agreed on supposition that explains Social Loafing holds individual identifiability/accountability for one's performance at the core of this phenomenon. Indeed loafing can be reduced if identifiability can be introduced into the group by some mechanism.
Of course, individual preferences and working styles do have a great effect on how prone someone is to demonstrate social loafing. Studies indicate that a lower preference for group work is inversely related to social loafing behavior.

Read more:

1. Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.
2. Zajonc, Robert B.; Heingartner, Alexander; Herman, Edward M. (1969) Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 13(2), 83-92.
3. Latané, Bibb; Williams, Kipling; Harkins, Stephen (1979) Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 37(6), 822-832.