Overall, I thought the summaries were quite good. Some of you did more comparing and contrasting than others (see below for some nice examples), and others engaged in more critique. Some of the critique tended to be less constructive; we want to watch that. When you find a flaw in a research report, try to think of ways that the flaw might be remedied. The interesting point about the summaries was that taken together they provide an outstanding overview and integration of the material. Thus I think it will be important for you to read all of the summaries in order to enhance your understanding.

One of the interesting themes (raised, for example, by Kevin and Bridget) was whether research on non-human species can be taken as evidence on the processes affecting human species. This tends to be a rather volatile issue. Some people tend to strongly believe in the correspondence between humans and other species, while others tend to strongly believe that humans are quite unique from other species. For the purposes of discussion in this class, we will want to retain a scientific perspective on the issue (as opposed to moral or philosophical). That is, if we believe that there is correspondence, then we must ask, "What evidence is there for correspondence?" (and if we believe there is uniqueness, we ask the same question). Also, keep in mind that one could posit that some processes are shared by human and non-human species, while others are not. Making these kinds of concerns salient, however, is a worthwhile exercise (more on this below). On the theme of human vs. non-human species, our question is whether social facilitation is a process that occurs similarly in human and non-human subjects. In fact, Zajonc is searching for a hypothesis that can explain the social facilitation, which was observed (between Triplett's 1897 article and this article) in research involving human and non-human subjects. The common explanation that appears to fit most of the data up through Cottrell's review is that the presence of others facilitates the emission of a dominant response, but inhibits the emission of non-dominant responses. The underlying mechanism is "drive" as specified in the Hull-Spence theory of stimulus-response learning. As Cottrell's review indicates, there seems to be substantial evidence for such a mechanism operating in both human and non-human species. John did a nice job of explaining the Hull-Spence theory. If anyone found it confusing, I'd encourage you to take a look at John's discussion in his summary.

Lois demonstrated an interesting struggle that I think we all engage in from time to time (similar to the kinds of concerns that Bridget and Kevin noted): we have philosophical/moral beliefs that can make it difficult to accept scientific findings. In particular, Lois comes to terms with this in her discussion of social loafing. I think it is good to make these kinds of concerns salient for a few reasons. First, it encourages us to question the scientific investigations. Remember, a key difference between science and common-sense is that we question science, but tend to assume common-sense. It is the questioning of science that helps us improve the method, argument, and therefore knowledge we amass. As Lois demonstrates, one can try to reconcile philosophical positions and scientific evidence. Lois illustrates this nicely by asserting that social loafing may not involve intentional deceit. In fact, the term "social loafing" (with its negative connotation) might be an unfortunate term for capturing the processes that are described (evaluation apprehension seems a bit "kinder" and perhaps more concise).

Also, I thought Reef did an outstanding job of trying to re-interpret the Bank Wiring Room results in terms of the mechanisms of the Zajonc-Cottrell model of social facilitation. Perhaps we should call this the "Youngreen Theoretical Extension"! Please take a look at Reef's analysis. I think this is worth discussing in class. As an aside, there was a little confusion about the Bank Wiring Room study. This was not research that Homans conducted. He is reanalyzing it in this article. The original work was conducted by Roethlesberger and Dickson (i.e., part of the "Hawthorne Studies"). The Bank Wiring Observation Room Study was actually the fourth in a series of five studies conducted between 1927 and 1939. I'll provide a brief overview of the series of studies in seminar on Monday. Also, remember that Homans established the approach he was taking in this book in our readings last week. For each study, he will first describe what was observed (using as little jargon as possible). After the description is presented, then he will go on and try to interpret it in sociological and social psychological terms. This week, I only had you read the description (on purpose). We will be reading Homans' interpretation in subsequent weeks. I wanted you to read the description and try to make sense of it in light of the readings this week. As we will see later, Homans uses different conceptual ideas to interpret the results. Some of his ideas, however, are consistent with the processes described in terms of social facilitation and social loafing. Yet (as we will see), he does not really refer to these ideas. This may reflect the robustness of the boundaries between the disciplines of sociology and psychology. It is interesting to see what kind of mileage we can get by using the ideas of a different discipline (psychology) to try to make sense of a common issue (group effects on the individual) within sociology. I probably should have done a better job explaining my rationale for all of this before you read the articles. Then again, it might not have made the puzzle as clear as it was!

Both Reef and Christabel explicitly raised the question of whether social facilitation is a group process. I'm not sure we have an answer to that question yet. It is definitely something that we can discuss in seminar. I will note that Cottrell's elaboration of Zajonc's theory seems to drive the idea of social facilitation more in the direction of being a social process. This is because he shows evidence that suggests that social facilitation processes are not "hard wired" (i.e., biologically/physiologically pre-determined). Rather, they must be learned. There has been some very interesting research recently that indicates that differentiates between learning (which implies a more cognitive exercise) and "triggering" (which involves a more instantaneous connection between a stimulus and a response that involves less (or, by some accounts, no) cognitive work).

Additionally, Christabel raised an interesting point that I had hoped people would see: the correspondence between the methodology used to study the Bank Wiring Room and Moreno's presentation of sociometry. As Christabel alludes to in her summary, the combination of interviews, sociometric observations (documenting antagonistic and friendly relations) helps us make sense of the different levels of performance in that were observed. Note that the workers were quite aware of the norm, as in Sherif's study. Also, however, they seemed aware that they were subject to the influence of others, unlike the participants in Sherif's study.

As Leana and others noted, the results in the Bank Wiring Observation Room Study (BWORS) and the experiments by Williams, Harkins, and Latane threw a bit of a wrench into the discussion of "social facilitation." Here, we have a situation where co-actors and audiences seem to motivate decrements in performance. As noted above, Reef does a nice job of trying to make some sense of this under the Zajonc-Cottrell arguments. I think that Kevin, Stephanie, Beth, Becki, and Daniel also provide an important hint that might help us understand at least the BWORS results: the familiarity of actors within the group. Could familiarity within the group, as well as what seemed to be a somewhat adversarial relation with an external group (i.e., management) represent an important factor that determines whether social loafing or facilitation occur? This foreshadows a question that Williams, Harkins, and Latane ask at the end of their article (i.e., "identifiable by whom?"). Chris offers a similar suggestion regarding tying the results in the BWORS to the discussion of honor in our earlier readings on Simmel. These two similar ideas actually hint at some later readings this semester on intergroup relations. One aspect of the BWORS that I thought was interesting was that even though there were clear antagonistic relations in the room, the workers all cooperated in maintaining the production norm. It seemed as though a superordinate norm (governing all other norms in the room) was to protect the group (as a whole) from management. This idea is captured in the norms Homans summarized near the end of the chapter. It may be that pre-existing familiarity (a pre-existing sense of group identity?) along with a sense of obligation (perhaps fostered by familiarity) contributed to the presence of social loafing as opposed to social facilitation in this study.

Such an explanation, however, does not work for the Williams, Harkins, and Latane (WHL) study. Here, we have a group with no prior history. Much like the social facilitation studies, procedures were in place to discourage the subjects from viewing the situation as a competition. Why, then, do we have loafing rather than facilitation? Bridget suggests a plausible reason -- perhaps shouting is not a dominant response (I have to agree that I would feel pretty inhibited about shouting, particularly in the presence of others). One problem with this explanation, however, is that it is a fairly easily learned response, and actors working alone did "learn" it. This research involved repeated trials. When they were shouting in pseudogroups, they had learned the response. Thus the co-actors should have increased it. There may, however, be some issue related not only to the ease with which one is able to emit a response, but also with one's anticipation of how the response may be generally viewed by others. Note that this hints at an upcoming issue that we will study in our readings on identity: our ability to reflexively view ourselves as we believe others view us.

Daniel also points to an important consideration: type of task. Does the kind of task affect the likelihood of loafing or facilitation? In our readings next week (on decision making and problem solving), we will find that task type may be an important consideration when trying to understand the dynamics of groups.

There were a few critiques of methodology. I think that these are reasonable. I also want to be careful to note the era in which some of these studies were conducted. For instance, Christabel suggested that it might have been problematic for the observer in the BWORS to record "significant" conversations. I agree that it would be nice if the researchers had given us a better idea of what would be considered significant. Also, while it would be ideal if we could have all of the information (i.e., records of all conversations), I do not think that was feasible during the time of this study (1927-1939). The equipment required would not only have been costly, but probably would have generated pretty sizeable demand effects. Recording machines would require using mics on workers all of the time (and the actual recording equipment was rather imposing in terms of size and appearance), and I think that writing down all of the conversations would have required several additional observers. Even with one observer per worker, I doubt accurate records would have been kept (remember how much Taylor talked?).

When it comes to acknowledging the challenges posed by lack of existing theory or technology, I think that Beth did a nice job in her summary. One of the nice features of this summary was how she highlighted the general themes that move across the readings on social facilitation. I agree that in many respects Allport was a pioneer in his thinking about these issues. It is important to remember that very little research had been accumulated by the time he wrote this article. Also, I encourage all of you to examine the ties that Beth makes between Zajonc's research, Homan's research and Sherif's experiment (from Week 4 readings). Together the two lines of reasoning represented by Zajonc and Sherif might explain some of the results in the BWORS. Notice how Beth suggests that the process might be dynamic, changing over time from a learning process to a social facilitation process. We might add some form of a social loafing phase after group members reach the normative output level (to prevent them from exceeding this norm).

One concern that many of you raised in different ways (e.g., Becki, Bridget) was the extent to which the information from these studies was generalizable. For instance, some of you suggested that the fact that experiments were conducted on a college student population or in a laboratory was a problem. I think we should try to find time to discuss this. The issue of generalizability is a sticky one and one that many people are a bit confused about. Let me pose the following question for you to think about this week, "What is it that is being generalized from research?"

Finally, some of you began to import outside theories into your discussion. I thought this was handled well -- not too much discussion, so we didn't get too far off track. For example, Kevin pondered how the social facilitation research might be related to research on status and influence (we will look at status and influence later in the semester). Actually, this could be quite a fruitful area of study. In the status research, patterns of response are argued to result from influence processes (higher status actors influence the responses of lower status actors) Since many of the status studies involve binary-choice ambiguous tasks and repeated trials, it might be feasible to analyze existing data to see if there is evidence of a dominant response that emerges over trials. The status-influence tasks give the subject a chance to agree with a partner, and we might argue that agreement (especially with a high status partner) is rewarding. (This would allow for further theoretical bridges to the Cottrell elaboration of the Zajonc hypothesis.) Also, one could argue that knowing that your response is going to be viewed by a partner, could be akin to an evaluation situation (thereby eliciting the kinds of evaluation apprehension processes evident in the WHL argument). Daniel also suggested that some recent work on social loafing (collective effort model) has tried to further articulate the factors that contribute to this process. Notice how the work Daniel cites addresses some of the questions posed at the end of the WHL article. If time permits, maybe we can get Daniel to give us a bit more information on these cutting edge theories!

This week at the beginning of our seminar, I would like to go around the class and have each of you provide your "grandparent" description of your paper project (i.e., the brief description of what you plan to pursue that your grandparents would understand). That way, as we bring in some outisde ideas in the summaries, we will all have a slightly better sense of what it is all about.

• What is "social facilitation?"
• What underlying mechanisms have been proposed to explain social facilitation?
• Which mechanisms seem to be operating in Homans' study?
• Do different mechanisms of social facilitation correspond to different group processes articulated by Harrington and Fine?
• Is social facilitation a "group process"? Under what conditions?
• Under what conditions might social loafing (instead of social facilitation) occur?

• Name your summaries "lastname##.doc" (no quotes), where ## is the week on the syllabus you are summarizing (but don't use a "#" sign). Also, please do not include spaces in the document name.
• Put your name at the top left of the first page of your summary.
• Do not number your pages.
• Avoid using spaces to indent (use tabs).
• Avoid using the "Return" key to space down and split a page (it won't look the same on another computer).
• Avoid quotes. Remember that one of the goals of the summary is to critique and compare/contrast. State what the ideas were that you are comparing, contrasting, or critiquing, rather than relying on a quote. One of the problems with relying on quotes is that it tends to direct you towards reporting rather than analyzing.
• Avoid sentence fragments. All sentences require a subject and a verb.
• When you are using "its" as a possessive there is no apostrophe (e.g., "The group has its own identity" not "The group has it's own identity").
• In U.S. English, commas and periods belong inside quotation marks. This includes instances when you are using quotes to identify a special use of a term as in this example: A person who is exhibiting strange behavior is sometimes referred to as a "mental case." Another example: A "mental case," a person exhibiting strange behavior, is often isloated from other social actors. Colons and semi-colons belong outside the quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation marks belong within the quotation marks when they apply only to the quoted matter. They belong outside the quotation marks when they apply to the whole sentence.
• In U.S. English, use double quotation marks unless you are using quotation marks within a quote. In the case where you are using quotation marks within a quote, then the embedded quotation marks are single quotation marks.
• Avoid "upon"; in almost every instance, "on" works just as well.