A Test of the Social Facilitation Theories of Cottrell and Zajonc in a Coaction Situation

Abstract. Zajonc ’ theory that the presence of a coactor is suffi-cient to facilitate a dominant response was compared with Cot-rell’s theory that facilitation does not occur unless coactors compete. During 150 baseline trials 80 males individually predic-ted the occurrence of two stimuli on a PDP-12 computer screen. For 150 test trials subjects were divided among alone-noncompetition, alone-competition, dyad-noncompetition, and dyad-competition con-ditions. In addition, an alone-incentive group was paid 1c per correct prediction in order to assess the effects of drive on the dominant prediction. The results supported Cottrell: only the alone-incentive and dyad-competition groups showed facilitation of the dominant prediction from baseline to test session. This paper deals with two basic hypotheses concerning the source of social facilitation effects. Zajonc (1965) first hypothesized that the presence of an audience or coactors increases a subject’s driv