Chapter 1: Better alone, or better together? How cockroaches brought us the answer...

Psychological experiments have always evoked fascination to various degrees with all people, it cannot be denied. The fact of the matter is that the ingenuity behind some experiments in psychology can sometimes be called nothing shorter than brilliant and/or ground-breaking (good or bad). One only needs to think of the famous Milgram (the one involving gradually electrocuting a fictitious counterpart to death) or Zimbardo (the 'prisoners and guards' simulation) experiments for some of the more famous ones regularly evoking fascination from people, if not full-blown movies. Now, what if I told you one of the more “popular” experiments within social psychology involved not people, but cockroaches...? Would you believe me?

Yes, you've heard me right, social psychology with cockroaches, and of course you should believe me, dear reader. I am not here to fool you!

“But, how in the hell then...?”

Well, let's begin! It all starts with one of the simplest, most basic questions social psychology could ever ask itself: do we do better alone, or in a group? In other words and at its very core: what is the most basic impact of doing something alone, versus doing the exact same thing in the presence of others? It might arguably be one of the most fundamental questions in the whole of social psychology. I will spare you the long-winded history, but suffices to say that over the years, the first valid experimental results were kind of weirdly contradictory when the question was first actively researched. In some experiments, the presence of others led to a better performance of a task compared to doing it alone, while in other experiments exactly the opposite happened, with a worse performance of the task at hand when not alone. It was admittedly rather strange to have same studies yield such radically contradictory results... Enter, then, Prof. Dr. Zajonc to see the pattern determining these variances in results, and formulate an answer for these differences with the drive theory of social facilitation, also called “activation theory”.

How did this theory come to be? Well, the actual task used to measure a difference between performing it alone versus in a group was hypothesized to be the explanation for this contradiction. As it turned out, the effects of the presence of others on doing something 'better' or 'worse', seemed to be dependent on the mastery of the task being performed. When the task used to compare in the experiments was a simple one, people performed better in group. When it was a complex one, they performed better alone. From there on, the drive theory of social facilitation was born, positing that the presence of others increases our general arousal level, which in turn increases the chance of performing one's so-called “dominant response”. This means that the response of the person will be more aligned with his “natural response” if you will, a concept now known in social psychology as someone's “dominant response”: the typical response of a same person in similar circumstances.

This entails, quite simply, that if you perform a task already well on your own, you'll perform a bit better in the presence of others; if you don't perform it well on your own, you'll perform a bit worse in the presence of others. Whatever you are most likely to do, failing or succeeding at a task, is enhanced by the mere presence of people around you. Quite the fundamental, yet simple and ground-breaking answer to an age old question - neatly dissected into a robust theory that would make Occam himself proud!

The drive theory of social facilitation concept was - obviously - researched and tried by fire with various replication studies to verify its validity and/or limits after that. In this further research process, many variants of the experiment were also tried and tested, with the surrounding others behaving in different ways: from just standing there with their backs turned to the person being assessed, all the way to performing the same task as the person next to him/her. It turned out that the drive theory of social facilitation seems to be applicable to near-any mere presence of others and pretty much a universal and fundamental axiom of social psychology. Even with their back(s) expressly turned towards you, others being there will enhance the frequency of your naturally dominant response by increasing your level of arousal, there is just no escaping this!

“Damn, interesting! But euhm, where are the cockroaches in all of this, Don...? Don't forget, you bastard, you promised me cockroach experiments and now I want to know!”

Well as I said, I wouldn't fool you, dear reader and it is here the nasty little things also get into our story. In a quest to further validate activation theory, a simple proposition was then also brought forward: is this effect so universal we could witness it in other - less cognitively advanced - species, which would further validate the theory...? Prof. Dr. Zajonc then came with the original idea of training cockroaches to find their way to a source of food in a very basic maze. And subsequently also surrounding said maze with an “arena” for cockroach-buddies to potentially spectate the race...!

Yes, dear reader, it is exactly what you imagine and I feel this is where I have to stress this isn't an Onion-article type thing: You take an athletic arena and runners up for some 200m dashing, you train some runners for an event, some not, and you then make them compete in an empty stadium versus full stadium to experiment... Except you basically do everything for and with cockroaches! The idea may seem odd, undeniably, but guess what, dear reader...? Even cockroaches seem to be subjected to the effect of the drive theory of social facilitation! That's right, so kudos to the rather bonkers idea of organizing cockroach-races in social psychology to Prof. Dr. Zajonc!

As an ending note - my promise of cockroaches fulfilled - let us therefore and from here on out try and abide by what social psychology dictates is a fundamental, universal rule in our day-to-day work, shall we not...?

Whenever you are up for a new task which you don't yet master well at work: try and do it as isolated as possible to train. You can have a room to yourself? Great, use it and train solo if it's possible! Just go fetch someone if you have questions (because I mean, you would be training, obviously...): it will make for a short break and give you a bit of head space as well.

You do master a task pretty well? Then in that case, don't be afraid to show off what you can do, manner of speaking! Just the mere presence of someone else in the room should naturally make you a bit more productive/successful at what you're busy with. So you have colleagues also doing things they can do well? Go work together if you can, you might not only have someone to talk to a bit, but statistically, you'll also work a tad better.

I mean, it is as simple, elegant and cockroach-containing as that!

Psychology can be bloody [self-redacted] amazing, can't it...? ??

See you on the next one (with less cockroaches),

Your technocratic Don Quixote