Effects of Social Facilitation upon Females' Performance of two Psychomotor Tasks

Abstract The purpose of this investigation was to test the effects of the presence of an audience as compared to a co-action group setting during performance of two different psychomotor tasks. Social facilitation theory predicts identical social influences resulting from either condition and does not take into account the nature of the task performed. Ninety female subjects were randomly selected from a voluntary population of 238. Thirty subjects were then randomly assigned to each of three treatment conditions: alone, audience, and co-action. All subjects performed three trials on each task: hand-steadiness and manual dexterity. Separate ANOVA was completed for performance on each task. When a significant F ratio was obtained the Tukey Method for multiple comparisons of means was applied. The results showed some support for the hypothesis that the effects of an audience and a co-action group setting are not identical. The co-action group performed significantly better than the audience group on both ta...