The Audience Effect
People tend to perform differently in front of an audience than when alone. Specifically, they tend to perform better in front of an audience when the task is simple or has been mastered, and worse when the task is complex or new.
What’s really unnerving or invigorating about an audience is the possibility that its members might be evaluating our performance. The threat of evaluation causes arousal. But the arousal is different for skilled and unskilled performers. For the unskilled performer it generates a fear of being judged negatively, which hurts performance. And for the skilled performer, it causes excitement at the prospect of being judged favorably. And that helps performance.
But, we can take advantage of this fact —
o what can we do to take advantage of the psychology behind the audience effect? Here are four suggestions:
- If we’ve mastered a task, and want to perform at our highest level, we should do it in front of an audience.
- If we are working on a complex task, or one we have yet to master, and we want to perform at our highest level, we should work on it privately.
- If we have a performance occasion thrust upon us, and we anticipate being evaluated for our performance, we should try to simplify the structure of the performance, and limit it, as far as possible, to things we have already mastered.
- If our opponent has more to lose socially than we do, we should arrange to compete in front of an audience. If it’s the reverse, we should arrange to compete privately (this one is a bit Machiavellian.)
