Social Facilitation and Inhibition

Do people act differently when they are alone than when they do when a group of people are watching? Social facilitation and social inhibition would answer, "yes." Social facilitation is the tendency to perform better at things that you are already good at when people are watching as opposed to when you are alone. If the dominant response is something that you are good at, the crowd will make your performance even better. For example, when Eli Osdoba is in games and everyone is watching, he tends to do better and tends to be more clutch than in pickup when there is no crowd. If as a response to the crowd, we get nervous because we are not so good at what we are doing, we tend to do worse. That is social inhibition. When we are not so good at something and there is a crowd watching, we tend to do worse than we normally do when we are alone.