The earliest social psychology studies were conducted in 1898 by Norman Tripplett in the USA. Although he found that people performed better when cycling in groups, he also noted that they would perform worse when isolated. In experiments with children trying to turn a fishing reel, he discovered that having company didn’t make them more competitive; just being around others made them slower.
In the mid-1920s, American psychologist Floyd Allport published a book about his studies on group behavior, he was one of the first true social psychologists at that time. He coined the term ‘social facilitation’ and later proposed the idea that people perform better in front of others, probably because they feel more self-conscious. While the idea of social facilitation is fairly straightforward, theories for its cause didn’t really take off until the 1960s. One such theory was developed by Robert Zajonc, with his experiments on cockroaches, who believed that the presence of others helped activate our brains, and would improve the performance of any task we were familiar with. While this theory made sense, it could also explain why people performed worse in more novel situations. He named this concept the ‘activation theory’.
