Social Facilitation and Impression Formation

The nondirectional effect of the drive theory of social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965) was investigated in an impression formation task. Participants who were either alone or in a group were exposed to a positive or a negative experimenter and then rated that experimenter on a series of bipolar adjectives. The mere presence of others intensified the experimenter ratings such that positive experimenters were rated more positively and negative experimenters were rated more negatively in the group condition. These findings support the hypothesis that the mere presence of others influences impression formation and that this effect is moderated by cues in the social context.