Social Facilitation and the History of the "rabbit"

I think that the comparison to the pacemaker is a very interesting one, but very fitting. I agree that the presence of another person increases performance. In my opinion this has a lot to do with the Yerkes-Dodson law, measuring arousal versus performance. It's much easier to get excited in the presence of another, thus increasing performance. This could also explain why people perform more poorly in the presence of a lot of people. A large crowd likely excites the individual too much, leading to decreased performance consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law.

I totally agree with the idea of social facilitation, because that is how the human nature is. One example from my experience is that my friends and I achieve a good score in SAT while we compete with each other. The competition made us to get better score than the other. Pace-makers are good example to describe social facilitation! Usually when I run by myself, I quit easily when the breath is getting harder, but I keep running when I run with people, because the pressure on me motivates my ego not to quit!

I agree with your point, I perform much better when I have someone to compete with or measure myself against, it kick starts my competitive instincts which help me perform much better than normal.

Social facilitation is definitely true. When there is someone else watching, who wants to look like a fool? It is true for me when I play golf. Me and some friends would have a friendly competition for lowest score every time we went to play, as we were all about the same skill level. Having other people there makes you take more care with shots and with the increased time, more accurate shots were made. We are now all better golfers for it and had some fun during the time too.

This is a very interesting concept. I fully agree with the first comment about Yerkes-Dodson law. Personally, I know that when I am rehearsing for dance I perform a lot better when there is an audience. I believe that when there is some sort of audience/crowd for a sport the athletes perform much better.

I agree that social facilitation is true for the most part. People tend to do better when in the presence of others because of competition or wanting to impress others. However, not everyone is like that. There are certain people who may get nervous when others are watching or they may even get distracted. I believe that this all depends on the person's personality.

Great example of social facilitation at work.

This blog is very interesting! I can see this in my life when I ran track in high school. Social facilitation played a huge role in the pace I ran at and made all the difference at what the race times were. There will always be one runner who will set the pace for everyone and sure enough everyone will catch on and follow the leader so to say. Do you think social facilitation plays the same role in school and grades on tests and work in class?

I actually use this method to study! I know that when I work in the presence of another person (preferrably a friend who won't talk a lot), I feel motivated to keep working much later than I would by myself because I see them working and feel the need to as well. I feel like this area of social psychology can have widespread implications and applications and can maybe help us function better or more efficiently at certain tasks. I am not familiar with track and field, but the example you gave is a great analogy as well as example of social facilitation.

Definitely true for paid and unpaid work, in my unpaid work it was much harder for me to do the tasks I didn't want to do than in my paid work when someone was watching me. Also, this illustrates why once the boss leaves, the work environment changes. This isn't always bad, especially if the boss is a tool.