2 - The early history of social facilitation

Summary

This chapter reviews the history of research into social facilitation, which has a long tradition extending back to 1898. Figure 1 shows a cumulative record of all the social facilitation studies from 1898 up to 1983. The major seminal papers on social facilitation were written in 1898 by Norman Triplett, in 1920 by Floyd Allport, and by Robert Zajonc in 1965. Figure 1 shows the increase in publications which occurred immediately after those papers.

There are a number of points which will be emphasized throughout this chapter about the historical development of social facilitation research. They will be made here first.

1. (1) The first point is that the definition of social facilitation keeps changing. In the very early work the term was not used at all. Allport (1924a) coined the term to refer to effects of the ‘sight and sound’ of another person doing the same activity (now called co-acting or co-working). Later the term was used for the effects of an audience as well. In the work with animals the term referred to many other processes including imitation.

One reason that ‘social facilitation’ kept changing its meaning was that the field of social psychology was developing rapidly during this period. Indeed, the first social facilitation experiment has often been called the first social psychological experiment. As social psychology changed so did the terminology and the topics of interest. In tracing these changes we will, in fact, trace the whole development of the discipline: from the early work based on German educationalists; through the introduction of experimental methods; to modern experimental social psychology.