... individuals normal behaviour outside an interacting group. The three main areas to consider are: social facilitation, de-individualisation and conformity. One way of determining whether group influence has a greater influence over behaviour than a personal acting solely on the basis of their personal characteristics is to examine the performance of an individual under the two different circumstances. Social Facilitation and Inhibition Social facilitation refers to the situation whereby the performance of an individual is improved in the presence of others; this could be co-action - task performance in a group, or passive - task performance in front of an audience. Experiments in this area have produced mixed results. Sometimes co-action seemed to facilitate performance (e.g. Triplett 1898), particularly the quantitative aspects of performance, while in other studies the quality of performance was impaired in co-action settings (e.g. Gates and Allee, 1933). An explanation for these ambiguous results was put forward by Zajonc (1965). ...

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