Many runners know the feeling well — miles of training can feel sluggish and uninspiring. Then, on race day, the course is filled with other runners as well as spectators. The steps seem to come easier and faster.
Scientists have long understood that people can perform better on certain tasks when others are watching. But after COVID-19 hit, spectators disappeared from sidelines and stadiums. When events resumed without fans, scientists had an opportunity to further study the relationship between audiences and motivation, a concept called social facilitation.
Why Do People Act Differently When Watched?
The idea behind social facilitation is that having an audience motivates people to do better than they would if they were alone. Although clinical trials and data analysis into social facilitation have spanned more than a century, neuroscience studies involving social facilitation are new. These studies are helping to determine what happens in the brain when people look on and performance improves (or, in some cases, declines).
In a 2018 study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, researchers wanted to see what was happening in the brain when a person knew others were watching them and their performance improved.
