Does the presence of other people help or hinder performance in a motor task?

This is the question addressed in the article by Edda van Meurs, Jona Greve and Bernd Strauss, which has just been published in the renowned journal “International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology” (click here for the article). Under the title “Moving in the presence of others – a systematic review and meta-analysis on social facilitation", all studies and experiments comparing performance in a coordination-based or condition-based motor task in the presence of others and alone were searched for, categorised, and then summarised with the help of Lena Kober.

A total of 82 studies were included into the review, spanning across 100 years of research. Here it was found that condition-based performances, e.g. endurance running, increased in the presence of others, while the results of the coordination-based studies under time or accuracy pressure differed considerably. It was particularly noticeable that in many studies the experimenter was in the room during the "be alone" condition, possibly skewing the results.

The article describes some of the best-known theories of social facilitation and puts the present summary of empirical findings into an integrated framework of activation- and attention-focused theories.