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**Social facilitation** is a social phenomenon in which being in the presence
of others improves individual task performance.  [1]  [2]  That is, people do
better on tasks when they are with other people rather than when they are
doing the task alone. Situations that elicit social facilitation include
coaction, performing for an audience, and appears to depend on task
complexity.  [2]

Norman Triplett's early investigations describes social facilitation to occur
during instances of coaction, which is performing a task in the presence of
other people performing a similar task, while not necessarily engaging in
direct interactions with each other.  [2]  Triplett first observed this in
cyclists, finding that cyclists rode at faster speeds when competing against
other cyclists compared to when cycling alone.  [3]  Social facilitation has
also been known to occur when performing a task in front of an audience, or
during periods of observation, sometimes referred to as audience effects. For
instance, during exercise Meumann (1904) found that when being watched,
individuals could lift heavier weights compared to when they were not being
watched.  [4]  Research on the effects of coaction and audience effects on
social facilitation have been mixed.  [1]  [5]  [2]  In an attempt to discover
why these types of situations do not always trigger social facilitation, 
Robert Zajonc  (1965) theorized that
perhaps task complexity, or how simple versus complex a task is, could
influence whether or not social facilitation occurs.  [6]  [7]  [8]

Zajonc predicted that simple tasks would result in social facilitation within
group settings, whereas more complicated tasks would not.  [2]  According to
Zajonc, some tasks are easier to learn and perform than others because they
require dominant responses. Dominant responses are behavioral responses at the
top of an organism's behavioral repertoire, making them more readily
available, or 'dominant', above all other responses.  [8]  [2]  Tasks that
elicit dominant responses are typically simpler, less effortful, and easier to
perform compared to tasks eliciting non-dominant responses.  [8]  [2]  Non-
dominant responses are harder to carry out.  [8]  [2]  In sum, simple tasks
require dominant responses whereas complex tasks require non-dominant
responses.  [8]  When performing tasks in groups then, simple tasks will be
associated with social facilitation. However, complex tasks will not because
the presence of others becomes distracting when attempting to elicit non-
dominant responses that require more effort to use.  [8]

Later research develops the idea of coaction, audience effects, and task
complexity. For instance, the  Yerkes-Dodson law  , when applied to social facilitation, states that "the
mere presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and
accuracy of well-practiced tasks, but will degrade in the performance of less
familiar tasks."  [9]  Compared to their performance when alone, when in the
presence of others they tend to perform better on simple or well-rehearsed
tasks and worse on complex or new ones.  [5]

The audience effect attempts to explain psychologically why the presence of an
audience leads to people performing tasks better in some cases and worse in
others.  [10]  This idea was further explored when some studies showed that
the presence of a passive audience facilitated the better performance of a
simple task, while other studies showed that the presence of a passive
audience inhibited the performance of a more difficult task or one that was
not well practiced, possibly due to psychological pressure or  stress
 "Stress \(psychological\)") . (See 
Yerkes–Dodson law  .)

Many factors contribute to social facilitation, and many theories have been
proposed to try to explain the phenomena.