2. 职称英语
  3. Individual Performance and the Presence of OthersP1: A person’s performance on

Individual Performance and the Presence of OthersP1: A person’s performance on

游客2024-01-03  23
问题 Individual Performance and the Presence of Others
P1: A person’s performance on tasks can be either enhanced or impaired by the mere presence of others, and a person’s behavior as part of a group can be quite different from the person’s behavior when acting alone.
P2: Some psychologists believe that individual performance on a task or a competition can be either improved or interrupted by the mere presence of others. This is known as social facilitation, which refers to any change in behavior that is attributable to someone else watching. Research conducted on this phenomenon has emphasized two aspects: audience effects and coaction effects. The former is an attempt at psychologically explaining why the presence of an audience leads to people’s performing tasks better in some cases and worse in others, and the latter are effects on task performance attributable to the presence of someone else engaged in the same activity.
P3: In 1898, social psychologist Norman Triplett pioneered research on social facilitation by designing a simple experiment. In his research on the speed records of cyclists, he noticed that racing against each other rather than against the clock alone increased the cyclists’ speeds. Was this pattern of performance peculiar to competitive bicycling or was it part of a more general phenomenon whereby people work faster and harder in the presence of others than when performing alone? He attempted to duplicate this under laboratory conditions using children and fishing reels. There were two conditions: the child alone and children in pairs but working alone. Their task was to wind a given amount of fishing line and Triplett reports that many children worked faster in the presence of a partner doing the same task than when they performed alone.
P4: However, Triplett’s findings and explanations are not without controversy. In 1956, Robert Zajonc, an American social psychologist, was trying to figure out why some studies showed people’s performance being hindered by the presence of others rather than being improved. He argued that the presence of others serves as a source of arousal, and heightened arousal increases the likelihood of an organism to do better on well-learned or habitual responses. For this reason, arousal improves performance on simple, or familiar tasks. But on tasks that are difficult or tasks we are just learning, the incorrect response (making a mistake or not performing effectively) is dominant. The presence of other people further arouses us and increases our drive level, and so an individual’s performance will be enhanced if a task is simple but diminished if the task is complex. Other researchers have suggested that concern over the observers’ evaluation is what most affects people’s performance, particularly if they expect a negative evaluation.
P5: While interesting, the finding that people work faster in competition is hardly groundbreaking. What happens in cooperative tasks when two or more people are working together instead of competing? Do they increase their effort or slack off? Researcher Bibb Latane used the term "social loafing" to refer to the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from an individual feeling that his or her effort will not matter to the group. If the individual inputs are not identifiable, the person may work less hard. Latane showed this by blindfolding male college students while making them wear headphones that masked all noise. He then asked them to shout both in actual groups and pseudo-groups in which they shouted alone but believed they were shouting with others. When subjects believed one other person was shouting, they shouted 82% as intensely as they did alone, but with five others, their effort decreased to 74%.
P6: Harkins and Jackson found that social loafing disappeared when participants in a group believed that each person’s performance could be monitored and evaluated; indeed, even the idea that the group performance may be evaluated against some standard can be sufficient to eliminate the loafing effect. When a group is relatively small and group evaluation is important, some members will even expend extra effort if they know that some of their coworkers are unwilling, unreliable, or incompetent to perform well. Moreover, social loafing is unlikely when participants can evaluate their own individual contribution or when they have a personal stake in the outcome.■ It is also unlikely when participants feel that the task is challenging or when they are working with close friends or teammates.■ Some 80 experimental studies have been conducted on social loafing in diverse cultures.■ Based on evidence these studies have produced, social loafing probably occurs in almost all cultures.■ [br] An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some answer choices do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points. Drag your choices to the spaces where they belong. To review the passage, click on View Text.
The influence of the presence of other people on an individual’s behavior varies in different occasions.
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Answer Choices
A When people are present, the performance of individuals generally improves on tasks they already do well but worsens on tasks they generally do poorly.
B Studies show that bicycle racers pedal faster when they are competing against other racers, but children wind fishing reels slower when in the presence of others than when alone.
C People’s performance on a task is more affected by the presence of others when those others are engaged in the same task than when the others are passive spectators.
D When people work together on a common task but no one’s contribution is measured, there is a tendency for individuals to work less hard than if they were working alone.
E Social loafing decreases under certain conditions, such as when the performance of the group or its members is evaluated or when a positive outcome matters to the participants.
F While social loafing occurs in almost all groups across cultures, the extent to which it occurs in any particular group depends on the individual personalities of the group’s members.
选项
答案 A，D，E
解析 【文章总结题】本文主要讲述他人的存在对个人任务表现的不同影响。首先，其他人的存在能够使任务表现改善或变差，如果任务简单或者熟悉，个人的表现会得到增强，但如果任务复杂或是初学的，则会被削弱；其次，当很多人在一个组里同时工作、个人的付出和努力或者团队的表现没有被评估时，组内成员的努力会减少，社会惰化随之出现：最后，当成员或小组的表现被评估，或者成员们重视最后的结果时，社会惰化的情况会减少。因此涉及他人存在对个人表现的影响的A、D、E选项正确。B、C、F三个选项属于细节偏离主旨，或者与文章内容不一致。
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