Norman Triplett

Norman Triplett was an American psychologist at Indiana University, born on a farm near Perry, Illinois, in 1861 and dead in 1934. He is remembered for conducting one of the earliest experiments in social psychology, a study of social facilitation, which Gordon Allport later called the first experiment in the field, although recent scholars have challenged that claim. Triplett noticed that cyclists tend to ride faster in the presence of a rival than alone, then tested the idea in the laboratory, where 40 children turned a small fishing reel and, on average, turned it faster when working in pairs than when alone. His design split the children into two groups with different trial orders to cancel out practice and fatigue effects. Modern reanalysis, notably Michael Strube's in 2005, found the effects in his data small and not statistically significant. Triplett was also interested in sport psychology and in the psychology of magic, compiling a list of conjuring tricks and the principles behind them. He was the second doctoral student of Granville Stanley Hall.