Sport Psych-6-Audience effects

Audience effects (social)

Audience effects are an example of social facilitation. Social facilitation is a general term covering the effects of being in the presence of other people. 

These take place when other people are carrying out the same task alongside you. 

Triplett found that children wound fishing reels faster in the presence of other children than when they were asked to perform the same action alone. Audience effects occur in response to being watched, in most cases teams perform better playing at their home ground.

Zajonc's Drive Theory (1965)

Zajonc suggested that the presence of others affects performance by raising arousal levels, heightened arousal produced improved performance when the task is simple and the athlete is an expert. However, higher arousal leads to worse perofrmance when the task is complex or the performer is a novice. Z suggested that because of this having an audience will lead to a better performance for experts but a worse perofmance for novices.

Audience -> arousal level increases for all -> 

• simple task, expert athlete -> improved performance
• complex task, novice athlete -> worse performance

Michaels et al (1982)- researchers assessed the skill level of pool players in a uni bar, the presence of an audience improved the performance of the above-average players and impaired the performance of the below-average players. 

Cottrell's evaluation apprehension theory

Cottrell suggested that it is the level of anxiety experienced by the performer that impacts performance. Cottrell's evaluation apprehension theory suggests that the performer knows the audience can judge them positively or negatively

If the performer fears that the audience will judge them neg then the performance will be impaired.

The more expert an audience is the greater chance there is of a neg evaluation.

Distraction Conflict Theory

Baron (1986) suggested the distraction-conflict theory. 

This theory suggests that an audience can distract a performer. The performer then has a decision to make; do they concentrate on the task or pay attention to the audience? 

If the task is dominant then we don't need all our available attention to succeed but if the task is non-dominant then any distraction will result in the task being impaired.

Individual differences

An audience may not affect us all in the same way. It appears that the effect of an audience on athletic performances can be mediated by the personality of athletes. One personality that seems relevant is introversion/extroversion. 

Graydon and Murphy (1995) found that extroverts performed better in tennis serves than introverts when watched but worse alone. 

A review of factors affecting response to audiences by Uziel (2007) concluded that personality in particular extroversion and self-esteem is the most important factor affecting how we respond to the presence of an audience. Extroverts with high self-esteem respond best to audiences whereas introverts with low SE respond worse. 

The home advantage

Schwartz and Barsky (1997) analysed a lot of data from a variety of American sports (baseball, college American football, NFL, NHL and college basketball)

They found that in all four sports, the home…