The Social Facilitation Effect in Basketball: Shooting Free Throws

The present experiment was performed to determine how many free throws experts and novice basketball players would make in an alone and audience condition. According to Zajonc (1965), the presence of others acts a source of arousal in what is called the social facilitation effect. This theory proposes that on easy tasks the presence of others should facilitate performance, whereas on difficult tasks they should inhibit performance. It was therefore hypothesized that the experts would effectively make more free throws in front of an audience whereas the non experts would make more free throws in the alone condition. To test this hypothesis 10 experts and 10 non experts shot 25 free throws alone and 25 free throws in front of an audience. It was found that the experts made more free throws in front of an audience than by themselves and that the non experts made more free throws in the alone as opposed to the audience condition