An outline of Zajonc (1965)

As we saw in the last chapter, social facilitation research was either ignored or not carried out enthusiastically in the years after the Second World War. In 1965, Zajonc produced an influential account of the social facilitation literature. In this he made at least nine points, which, because of the importance of his article in renewing interest in the field, will be discussed in detail. Before doing this, the changes in experimental psychology which had occurred need to be outlined.

The development of experimental psychology

It needs to be kept in mind that between the last of the social facilitation studies and 1965, the whole research orientation of psychology, as well as theoretical orientation, had changed. Conceptually Hullian behaviourism had dominated psychology for many years, with its hypothetico-deductive model of research, its mechanistic approach, and its emphasis on observable behaviour.

Hullian behaviourism was a reaction to the looseness and conceptual uncertainty of earlier psychologies. Too many of the psychologies of the first third of this century dealt only with what people said about themselves: the verbalizations (introspections) about their thoughts, behaviour, feelings and emotions. While it is clear that how people talk about their own psychology is important (Farr and Moscovici, 1984), it was no longer clear by the mid-century that such verbalizations should be the basis for how psychology talks about thoughts, behaviour, feelings and emotions. After all, physicists no longer took seriously how people talked about tables and chairs: they considered the constituent molecules and atoms instead.