Social Facilitation

Abstract

Social facilitation, the theory, originated out of the field of experimental social psychology as a means of explaining individual's behavior in social situations. Social facilitation is described as enhancing one's dominant response simply by being in the presence of others. Social facilitation, while not widely applied to consumer behavior, holds hope of becoming an interesting and useful tool in attempting to predict consumer behavior, specifically, behavior in particular buying situations. This paper examines social facilitation theory, where the presence of others is central, as a good predictor of consumer behavior in shopping situations, like: store crowding and waiting in line. Thus, the following critical areas of social facilitation are explored: mere presence of others, distraction-conflict, evaluation apprehension, and crowding. Before these areas can be applied, it is necessary to investigate the origin of social facilitation, the theory.

Key Words:

• Social facilitation
• consumer behavior
• buying behavior
• evaluation apprehension
• store crowding
• distraction-conflict
• mere presence