The effect of failure and the nature of the audience on performance of a complex motor task

Social facilitation theory states that an audience functions as a conditioned stimulus for generalized drive and that this drive effect is learned through classical conditioning. In the present study an attempt was made to classically condition an aversive drive to an audience by having a subject fail a task in front of an audience. A sample of 72 subjects (12 per group) took part in a 3 × 2 factorial design. Half of the subjects were exposed to failure in front of an audience on a first task. These subjects then performed a second complex motor task in front of the same audience who were described as either experts on this second task or as students who were interested in the task (non-expert audience). No differences in performance were found between those groups that had failed a first task and those that had not. However, significant differences in performance were found between the no-audience control, non-expert audience, and expert audience conditions.