Swimming in Social Facilitation

 According to Zajonc’s Solution to Social Facilitation, being around other people excites our bodies, and that leads us to behave in the way that comes to us most automatically, our dominant response (Zajonc, 1965).  This behavior tends to lead to greater success with simple or familiar activities (Zajonc, 1965). However, this immediate reaction also tends to hinder our abilities in difficult or novel activities (Zajonc, 1965).  

Triplett (1898) studied how the presence of other people could affect the speed at which one does an activity. In this study, he asked children to wind up fishing spools, either on their own, or together, and the results suggested that the paired-up children rolled up the spool faster than those on their own (Triplett, 1898). This supports part of Zajonc’s solution, that social facilitation tends to help with easy tasks (Zajonc, 1965). 

I was taught how to swim at a young age and participated in teams on and off throughout my childhood. When I was in high school, I practiced with my team, and my coach broke every part of a race down into individual drills. We would line up and practice diving off the block, sprinting to the end of the pool, before hopping back out and trying again. It wasn’t unusual for goggles to flip over or fall off from a dive. The natural response would be to stop and retrieve them, but we were taught to keep swimming, no matter what. Our coach told us that repetition would help us compete well and feel more confident swimming in front of an audience. She also prepped us by holding intrasquad meets, where we competed against other team members with our parents in the audience. At official meets, parents, teammates, coaches, other teams, referees, and (human) timers all watch. I remember always feeling nervous standing behind the block with the rest of the swimmers in my heat. However, when the starting beep went off and the race started, those nerves would focus me to do what I had practiced: swimming as fast as I could. Though it is recommended that you focus on your own performance, I would always glance over to the other lanes to try to keep up. Though I have never been a fast swimmer, my times from swim meets were consistently better than practice times.

After high school, as I have tried to continue swimming for fun and health, I realized that I swim slower and for shorter distances when I am on my own rather than in a group. Since I push myself more when I’m in a group, I prefer to practice with organized adult swim groups. Swimming is a skill I was lucky enough to learn when I was young, so combined with training, it became an easy task and I performed better at it in front of a group, as Zajonc would predict (Zajonc, 1965). 

 

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Honor Code: I have acted with honesty and integrity in producing this work and am unaware of anyone who as not. /s/ Ellie Munson

 

Reference List

 

Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. The American Journal of Psychology, 9(4), 507–533. https://doi.org/10.2307/1412188

Time when I did NOT do better because of the facilitation

 

Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social Facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269–274. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1715944