Social Facilitation of Human Performance: Mere Presence Effects

Summary An experiment was conducted (N = 60 college women) to test the proposition that the “mere presence” of another human being, as opposed to the presence of a potentially evaluative audience, is a sufficient condition for the social facilitation of performance on a simple task. Mere presence was defined as the physical proximity of a blindfolded peer, and performance was evaluated on a bidirectional choice maze. When compared to a control group that traversed the maze in isolation, Ss in the mere presence of a peer both completed experimental trials faster (p < .01) and made fewer errors while doing so (p < .02), thus providing support for the mere presence hypothesis. On the other hand, while Ss who traversed the maze in the presence of an observing (nonblindfolded) peer also worked faster than controls (p < .05), they were not superior to controls in terms of error rate. It was noteworthy that still other Ss who worked in the company of a blindfolded or nonblindfolded mannikin produced results exactly parallel in form to those from Ss who worked in the company of a blindfolded or nonblindfolded human being. These findings were discussed in terms of a definition of mere presence that takes into account the distractability or predictability of the other in social situations.