Social facilitation of dominant responses by the presence of an audicence and the mere presence of others.

Experiments have shown that the presence of an audience affects individual performance by enhancing the emission of dominant responses. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposal of Zajonc that the mere presence of other persons is responsible for audience effects. A total of 45 university students performed a pseudorecognition task; 15 performed the task alone, IS performed the task before an audience of 2 passive spectators, and 15 performed the task in the presence of 2 persons who were not spectators. The task placed previously established verbal habits in competition with each other. The presence of an audience enhanced the emission of dominant responses, but the mere presence of others did not.