Social facilitation as a function of the mere presence of others

According to R. B. Zajonc's (1965) drive theory of social facilitation, the mere presence of others increases arousal and, thereby, the frequency of d ominant responses (i.e., responses with the greatest habit strength). In th e present experiment, U,S, undergraduates performed a stimulus discriminati on task under 1 of 2 conditions: in the presence of another individual (aud ience) or alone. The mere presence condition was designed to make it diffic ult for the participants to attend directly to the audience. The task was d esigned to minimize the likelihood that the specific response (numerical pr eference) would be attributable to a desire to respond appropriately to the audience. There was a significant difference in the mean number of dominan t responses between the participants in the audience condition and those in the alone condition. The results provide support for Zajonc's mere presenc e drive theory of social facilitation.