Application
Social facilitation is a widespread phenomenon in society. As established above, social facilitation is the ability to excel on simple tasks and worse on complex tasks because of the presence of others. Many public tasks demonstrate the effects, both the costs and benefits, of social facilitation. From taking exams in a high school or college environment to performing in sporting events, people may perform better or fall short depending on the task’s complexity. In many experiments, people display signs of social facilitation even in every day tasks, such as driving - increasing ability when others are present. This effect can even be seen in animals, as displayed by Zajonc, Heingarter, and Herman’s aforementioned study on cockroaches. Businesses can even use social facilitation to their advantage, through placing their employees in evaluated, group situations for simple tasks. Students can also place themselves in group situations for simple tests to improve their performance, or conversely, sit farther away from other classmates on complex tasks.
Read more about this topic: Social Facilitation
Famous quotes containing the word application:
“We will not be imposed upon by this vast application of forces. We believe that most things will have to be accomplished still by the application called Industry. We are rather pleased, after all, to consider the small private, but both constant and accumulated, force which stands behind every spade in the field. This it is that makes the valleys shine, and the deserts really bloom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy.—Take of common sense quantum sufficit, add a little application to the rules and orders of the House, throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness, and elegancy of style.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)