Audience Effect
The tendency for people to perform differently when in the presence of others than when alone.
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Origin
Norman Triplett planted the first empirical seed in 1898, noticing that cyclists raced faster when competing against others than against the clock. In 1924, Floyd Allport coined "social facilitation" in his textbook Social Psychology. A modern theoretical account arrived in 1965, when Robert Zajonc published his drive-theory paper in Science, unifying contradictory findings about audience effects.
Updated February 22, 2026