Facilitated Exercise

Hey Everyone!

This week I'm talking about social facilitation. Social facilitation was proposed by Zajonc (1965,1980) and states that the presence of others causes individuals to preform better or worse on tasks depending on the task. Zajonc (1965, 1980) said that the presence of others will cause an individual to exhibit the dominate response, in other words, the reaction that is given most easily or quickly. This means that performance on a task increases in the presence of others when the task is easy or when someone is well practiced at it (such as playing a musical instrument or sport) but decreases when the task is difficult or novel (Zajonc, 1965; Zajonc, 1980).

However, some consider the simple presence of others to be insufficient to cause a change in behavior. Specifically, the evaluation apprehension theory states that performance will only be affected (either negatively or positively depending) if there are others watching who have the possibility to evaluate the performance (Geen, 1991; Henchy & Glass, 1968). Importantly, this theory makes it clear that in order for performance to be affected, an individual has to feel like they are being evaluated (or that it is at least a possibility) by those around them.

As someone who has taken FRAs and does not consider themselves particularly athletic, I can definitely attest to the influence of others on my performance (as I'm sure many others can). I took jogging for fitness as an FRA and when I started off my, I was not good, but no big deal, I quickly built up strength and stamina. After the class ended I continued running; I would jog casually outdoors (as opposed to the gym) and then stop after a little while feeling like I sufficiently got out and got some exercise. Then, one day, I thought, hey why not go back to the gym and run, so I did. I happened to go at a time when a jogging class met and there were a lot of people running on the track. No big deal I thought, I've been running often on my own. So I started jogging but I quickly was worn out and by the end I felt nauseous!

What happened? Well two things, first of all jogging around all of those other people caused me to jog harder than I normally did on my own causing me to push myself a lot harder to the point where I felt sick afterward. The second thing is that when I was jogging on my own all that time I didn't have all of that social pressure to jog harder and my performance declined. What a bummer! Another important part of this is that being around a ton of joggers activated the feeling that I could be judged as they would all be able to tell how bad of a jogger I was, specifically because I was having to exercise with them and they could see me. This would have not happened if all of the other joggers were blindfolded because, aside from them all running into walls and exercise equipment due to blind jogging, I would not feel like my performance was not being evaluated and I would not have felt nearly as pressured to increase my performance. In sum, I modified my performance (at least partly without even realizing it!) because I didn't want everyone to think I was unhealthy! I think there is an important lesson here, if you need some motivation to exercise harder, do it in a gym where you feel pressured to try harder due to the presence of other gym goers; it definitely worked for me.

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Geen, R. G. (1991). Social Motivation. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 377-399.

Henchy, T., & Glass, D. C. (1968). Evaluation apprehension and the social facilitation of dominant and subordinate responses. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 10, 446-454.

Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.

Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Compresence. In P. B. Paulus (Ed.), Psychology of group influence (pp. 35-60). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.