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  3. Individual Performance and the Presence of Others P1: A person’s performance on tasks can be either enhanced or impaired by the

Individual Performance and the Presence of Others P1: A person’s performance on tasks can be either enhanced or impaired by the

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问题 Individual Performance and the Presence of Others
P1: A person’s performance on tasks can be either enhanced or impaired by the mere presence of others, and a person’s behavior as part of a group can be quite different from the person’s behavior when acting alone.
P2: Some psychologists believe that individual performance on a task or a competition can be either improved or interrupted by the mere presence of others. This is known as social facilitation, which refers to any change in behavior that is attributable to someone else watching. Research conducted on this phenomenon has emphasized two aspects: audience effects and coaction effects. The former is an attempt at psychologically explaining why the presence of an audience leads to people’s performing tasks better in some cases and worse in others, and the latter are effects on task performance attributable to the presence of someone else engaged in the same activity.
P3: In 1898, social psychologist Norman Triplett pioneered research on social facilitation by designing a simple experiment. In his research on the speed records of cyclists, he noticed that racing against each other rather than against the clock alone increased the cyclists’ speeds. Was this pattern of performance peculiar to competitive bicycling or was it part of a more general phenomenon whereby people work faster and harder in the presence of others than when performing alone? He attempted to duplicate this under laboratory conditions using children and fishing reels. There were two conditions: the child alone and children in pairs but working alone. Their task was to wind a given amount of fishing line and Triplett reports that many children worked faster in the presence of a partner doing the same task than when they performed alone.
P4: However, Triplett’s findings and explanations are not without controversy. In 1956, Robert Zajonc, an American social psychologist, was trying to figure out why some studies showed people’s performance being hindered by the presence of others rather than being improved. He argued that the presence of others serves as a source of arousal, and heightened arousal increases the likelihood of an organism to do better on well-learned or habitual responses. For this reason, arousal improves performance on simple, or familiar tasks. But on tasks that are difficult or tasks we are just learning, the incorrect response (making a mistake or not performing effectively) is dominant. The presence of other people further arouses us and increases our drive level, and so an individual’s performance will be enhanced if a task is simple but diminished if the task is complex. Other researchers have suggested that concern over the observers’ evaluation is what most affects people’s performance, particularly if they expect a negative evaluation.
P5: While interesting, the finding that people work faster in competition is hardly groundbreaking. What happens in cooperative tasks when two or more people are working together instead of competing? Do they increase their effort or slack off? Researcher Bibb Latane used the term "social loafing" to refer to the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from an individual feeling that his or her effort will not matter to the group. If the individual inputs are not identifiable, the person may work less hard. Latane showed this by blindfolding male college students while making them wear headphones that masked all noise. He then asked them to shout both in actual groups and pseudo-groups in which they shouted alone but believed they were shouting with others. When subjects believed one other person was shouting, they shouted 82% as intensely as they did alone, but with five others, their effort decreased to 74%.
P6: Harkins and Jackson found that social loafing disappeared when participants in a group believed that each person’s performance could be monitored and evaluated; indeed, even the idea that the group performance may be evaluated against some standard can be sufficient to eliminate the loafing effect. When a group is relatively small and group evaluation is important, some members will even expend extra effort if they know that some of their coworkers are unwilling, unreliable, or incompetent to perform well. Moreover, social loafing is unlikely when participants can evaluate their own individual contribution or when they have a personal stake in the outcome.■ It is also unlikely when participants feel that the task is challenging or when they are working with close friends or teammates.■ Some 80 experimental studies have been conducted on social loafing in diverse cultures.■ Based on evidence these studies have produced, social loafing probably occurs in almost all cultures.■
According to paragraph 4, if other people are present, a person’s performance on a task that he or she is just learning would most likely be
选项 A、somewhat worse than if no one else is there
B、somewhat better than if no one else is there
C、completely unaffected by the presence of those other people
D、dependent on the number of people who are present
答案B
解析 【事实信息题】倒数第2句提到对于那些难的或者初学的任务，不正确的反应(出错或没有高效地执行)是占主导地位的。所以如果没有他人存在的话，人们在初学的任务中会表现得更好一点。
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