Everyone crowd around, you make me better

As I have mentioned before in my blogs I have played sports for the majority of my life. As a child I played soccer, tennis, and basketball (as embarrassing as it is, I also played on my high school bowling team).  As such, I have played in many important or clutch games with many spectators throughout my life. It is hard for me to do (and I hope I do not come off arrogant when I say this) but I was good at the sports I played (with the exception for basketball – I am not very tall – as such, this is my justification for not being good J). However, I am good at both tennis and soccer. Specifically, when I was younger soccer dominated my life. This notion, in combination with the fact that I was one of the better players on the team, I had a lot of playing time. To this point, there was always added pressure for me to do well especially during important games. However, for me this was never really an issue. When my coach needed me to score a goal, the majority of the time I came through and did what was asked of me.

This notion is in line with the concept of social facilitation. This concept basically says that in the presence of others or spectators we become aroused (not sexually!!) and this arousal enables a dominant response that will either hurt or help the individual (Zajonc, 1965). Basically this means that, in the presence of others, people will react to specters basted on their dominant response with respect to the activity (Zajonc, 1965). The dominate response in this situation is basically how easy, comfortable, or good you at the activity or ‘how well learned it is’ (Zajonc, 1965). That is, if you have an audience and you are performing a new challenging task or activity your dominant response that is elicited will lead you to not do as well; in contrast, if you are performing in front of an audience, completing a task or activity you are good at, then your dominant response will lead you to be more successful based on the presence of the audience (Zajonc, 1965). So for me, in the presence of others or a large audience when I play soccer or other activities that I am good at, I perform better. That’s why when I played soccer and it was our final game that I actually tended to play better because of the added number of spectators that usually come to such important games.

(n=428)  

Zajonc, R.B. (1965). Social Facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.