History  

Social facilitation can be defined as a tendency for individuals to perform
differently when in the mere presence of others. Specifically, individuals
perform better on simpler or well-rehearsed tasks and perform worse on complex
or new ones. In relation to this, there are three main empirical relationships
which are the activation, evaluation, and attention theories. The activation
theory describes how we are physiologically aroused and how that affects our
functioning. The  evaluation  theory relates
to the systematic assessment of the worth or merit of some object. The 
attention  theory takes into account possession
in the mind including focalization and concentration of  consciousness
 .

In 1897, Triplett  [11]  studied the effect on performance of having an
audience. Triplett's experiment had a simple design; a cyclist's performance
when alone was compared with a cyclist's performance when racing against
another cyclist. He found that the cyclist was slowest when he was only racing
the clock and not another cyclist. He attributed these results to a
competitive instinct which releases energy that was not available when
pedaling alone. Triplett's study started off a revolution of studies
attempting to examine the theory that people's performance is influenced by
the presence of others. In 1898, while studying the competitive nature of
children,  [5]  he found that children were much faster at completing their
given activity (winding string) while they were competing, which caused him to
wonder whether or not simply having another individual there would have the
same effect. To determine this, Triplett studied the race time of cyclists and
found that cyclists had faster race times when in the presence of other
cyclists. He theorized that the faster times were because the presence of
others made individuals more competitive, and further research led Triplett to
theorize that the presence of others increases individuals' performances in
other noncompetitive situations as well.

In 1924, Floyd Allport, coined the term social facilitation.  [5]  Allport
conducted studies in which participants sat either alone or with other
participants and did a variety of tasks such as word association tasks and
multiplication assessments. He found that people performed better when in a
group setting than when alone for the majority of tasks.  [8]  However, at
this time, social facilitation simply meant an "increase in response merely
from the sight or sound of others making the same movement."  [5]

Hazel Markus of the  University of Michigan  conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis that
the mere presence of others can influence an individual's performance.  [12]
A task that lacked a rubric structure and was likely to cause the subject to
be apprehensive of how they would be evaluated was used. Performance times on
the task of dressing and undressing in familiar and unfamiliar clothing were
compared with subjects working alone, working in the presence of a passive
inattentive person, and working in the presence of an attentive spectator.
Compared to the alone condition, both social conditions (audience and
incidental audience) enhanced performance on the well-learned aspects of the
task of dressing and undressing with the subject's own familiar clothing and
hindered the subject's performance on the more complex aspects of the task of
dressing and undressing using unfamiliar clothing. It was concluded that the
presence of others is a sufficient condition for social facilitation and
social interference effects. Therefore, the presence of an audience causes an
individual to do better on a simple task or worse on a more complicated task.

In a 2010 study,  donation  rates increased with
the presence of observers, and  neuroimaging  revealed that the presence of observers significantly affected
activation in the  ventral striatum  before the choice of whether or not to donate.  [13]

In Raefeli's meta-analysis of the social facilitation phenomenon in 2002,
three conclusions are made. Firstly, the presence of others heightens an
individual's physiological arousal only if the individual is performing a
complex task. Moreover, the mere presence of others increases the speed of