SOCIAL INFLUENCE
(1) Of the many influences on human behaviour, social influences are the most pervasive. The main influence on people is people. When we hear the term social influence, most of us think of deliberate attempts of someone to persuade us to alter our actions or change our opinions. The television commercial
comes to mind. But many of the most important forms of social influence are unintentional, and some of the effects we humans have on one another occur by virtue of the simple fact that we are in each other's physical presence.
(2) In 1898, a psychologist named Triplett made an interesting observation. In looking over speed records of bicycle racers, he noticed that better speed records were obtained when cyclists raced against each other than when they raced against the clock. This observation led Triplett to perform the first controlled laboratory experiment ever conducted in social psychology. He instructed children to turn a wheel as fast as possible for a certain period of time. Sometimes two children worked at the same time in the same room, each with his own wheel; at other times, they worked alone. The results proved his theory: Children worked faster in co-action, that is, when another child doing the same thing was present, than when they worked alone.
(3) Soon after Triplett's experiment on co-action, it was discovered that the mere presence of a passive spectator (an audience rather than a co-actor) was sufficient to facilitate performance. This was discovered accidentally in an experiment on muscular effort and fatigue by Meumann (1904), who found that subjects lifted a weight faster and farther whenever the psychologist was in the room. Later experiments have
confirmed this audience effect.
(4) It appears that co-action and audience effects in humans are caused by the individual's "cognitive" concerns about competition and the evaluation of performance that others will make. We learn as we grow up that others praise or criticize, reward or punish our performances, and this raises our drive level when we perform before others. Thus, even the early studies of co-action found that if all elements of competition are removed, co-action effects are reduced or eliminated. Similarly, audience effects are a function of the subject's interpretation of how much he is being evaluated.