Social Facilitation

Group projects have always been something I have disliked. From the moment they are assigned, I dread the thought of having to arrange for everyone to meet, for everyone to follow through and actually show up, and to imagine that it will ever be finished to an acceptable level. Social facilitation caught my eye in my cultural psychology book as I was curious to learn whether or not group projects do in fact bring the abilities/ efforts of an individual to a lower standard, or if I was simply being dramatic. 

Social facilitation is known as a tendency for people to do better on tasks they know and have rehearsed when in the presence of others, but do worse on tasks they are not as familiar with (Heine, 2010). This makes me think of myself personally as if I know enough on a subject, such as physical activity for example, I can confidently have a conversation with someone or write a paper on it in no time at all. If I am hesitant though, maybe with something as giving a speech on politics, I am likely to freeze up and become frustrated and embarrassed causing me to seem even less knowledgeable on the subject. 

Social facilitation also reminded me of another personal experience related to sports. When I played high school soccer, our team always finished somewhere in the middle of the league at the end of the season. It seemed when we really needed to pull a strong effort together against a team that was clearly better than we were, we could do it. We had everyone all in giving 110% when it counted. The problem was that when we played teams we knew we should easily beat, its as if we slacked off because we knew we would come out on top. This affected us in the long run because when it came down to ranking everyone by points, we were not actually that far ahead of where we should have been from playing these teams below our level.