Triplett's Cycling Experiments

In 1898 the psychologist Norman Triplett published a study of competitive cycling widely regarded as the first published experiment in social psychology, prompted by his own observation, drawn from official bicycle racing records, that cyclists tended to post faster times when racing directly against another rider than when racing alone against the clock. To test this pattern under controlled conditions, Triplett had children turn a fishing reel as quickly as they could, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside another child performing the same task, isolating the simple presence of a co-acting other as the one variable that changed between conditions. Triplett found that children generally reeled faster when another child was working alongside them than when working alone, and he proposed that the bodily presence of another person engaged in the same competitive activity released what he called latent dynamogenic energy not otherwise available to the performer. Though later analyses have questioned how strong and consistent Triplett's original results actually were by modern statistical standards, his study established the basic experimental method, isolating the presence of others as an independent variable affecting performance, that became the foundation for the extensive later literature on social facilitation, in which the presence of others is shown to enhance performance on well-learned tasks while sometimes impairing performance on difficult or unfamiliar ones.