Have you ever noticed that for the most productive work you need to work all alone, the presence of people with you in the room negatively affects your activity? If this is the case, then perhaps the effect of social inhibition takes place. What is it and what does it threaten us, now we'll figure it out.
Social Inhibition and Social Facilitation
In social psychology, there are such concepts as social inhibition and facilitation. These phenomena should be considered in a complex, as they are two sides of the same coin - the presence of people in the performance of any work. Positive influence is facilitation, negative - inhibition.
The facilitation effect was discovered by Norman Triplet, who was studying the influence of a competitive situation on the speed of a cyclist. He found out that athletes achieve better results when competing with each other, rather than when working on a stopwatch. This phenomenon, when a person works better in the presence of other people, was called the effect of facilitation.
The effect of inhibition is the opposite of facilitation and consists in the fact that a person works worse in the presence of other people. For example, people find it difficult to memorize a meaningless set of words, go through a maze or multiply complex numbers, being in front of other people. The middle of the 60s of the XX century was marked by a change in the approach to studying the effect of inhibition, now it began to be considered in a broader socio-psychological sense.
R. Zayens conducted studies of how dominant reactions are amplified in the presence of other people due to the creation of social excitement. The principle, which was known for a long time in experimental psychology,