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Zajonc's drive theory
Sometimes the presence of an audience can improve the performance of a sports person – this is referred to as social facilitation. However, sometimes an audience can have the opposite effect on performance.
In an attempt to help to explain the effects others can have on performance, Zajonc (1965) proposed the drive theory of Social Facilitation and explained two types of effect. This Links in with drive theory of arousal. The suggestion is that as a skill becomes well learned it requires less Arousal to be performed and the presence of others stimulates arousal.Thus drive theory would suggest that, first, the presence of others when carrying out a simple or well-learned task would actually improve performance and second, for complex or novel tasks, the presence of others may damage performance.In summary, Zajonc drew four conclusions from this theory:
• the presence of others leads to Arousal or ‘drive’
• increased Arousal leads to an increased chance that the dominant response will occur
• for simple or well-learned tasks the dominant response is appropriate and leads to improved performance
• for complex tasks the dominant response will be incorrect due to over-arousal and will thus lead to a decline in performance.
However many psychologists nowadays believe that drive theory is too simplistic.
According to the inverted U Hypothesis of arousal, the presence of others may enhance performance but only up to a point, beyond which performance will show a steady decline. This theory also proposes that the optimum level of performance is dependent upon the sport, the skill level and the individual, and thus the presence of others will not have same effect on every individual or in every situation.
Zajonc had proposed that the mere presence of others was sufficient to elicit arousal, which in turn would affect performance.
However, Cottrell (1968) suggested that it isn’t the presence of others that leads to arousal, but the apprehension of being evaluated by others, which he believed is a type of social anxiety. He thus developed his evaluation-apprehension theory. This idea stems from the fact that being watched doesn’t always lead to an impairment of performance.
