Why an Audience Lifts You Up or Trips You Up

I learned the piano during my secondary school years. I still remember representing my school in a piano competition in Form Five. At the time I thought: I'd been putting in regular practice each day, and my teacher reckoned I had a good chance of winning (she estimated my score would be at least 80). Surely I'd take home a prize today! And yet, the moment I stood on stage, with my ten fingers racing across the black and white keys, I noticed mistakes pouring out — too painful to watch — and the prize slipped away with them.

The social psychologist Zajonc proposed that when a person carries out a particular behaviour in a given setting, the presence of others affects how that person performs — a phenomenon known as social facilitation. A performer experiences physiological arousal because of the presence of others, such as a faster heartbeat and heavier sweating, which in turn affects the performer's dominant response. These physiological effects, however, play out differently depending on the difficulty of the performer's dominant response (the behaviour being performed). If the task is simple for the performer, their performance (the dominant response) is enhanced by the arousal. But when the performer is not skilled at the task (such as playing a piece they haven't yet rehearsed well), the performer's dominant response drops instead.

So when we haven't yet practised a behaviour to the point of mastery, or when we still feel rather under-prepared before going out to perform, our actual performance may well decline as a result.

(This article was originally published on "VJMedia" on 13 October 2018; click here to read the original.)

Reference: Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Ann Arbor: Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.