Being watched may boost your performance
People perform better when they are being watched, say scientists, contradicting the belief that we often mess up performances when we have an audience. When people know they are being observed, parts of the brain associated with social awareness and reward invigorate a part of the brain that controls motor skills, improving their performance at skilled tasks.
The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, could help people become more effective in the workplace and in school. “You might think having people watch you isn’t going to help, but it might actually make you perform better. An audience can serve as an extra bit of incentive,” said Vikram Chib, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in the US.
Chib, who has studied what happens in the brain when people choke under pressure, originally launched this project to investigate how performance suffers under social observation.
However, it quickly became clear that in certain situations, having an audience spurred people to do better, the same way it would if money was on the line. Researchers devised an experiment, held at the California Institute of Technology in the US, in which 20 participants performed a task and were paid a small amount of money contingent on how well they did.
The task involved playing video game both in front of an audience of two and with no one watching. When participants knew an audience was watching, a part of the prefrontal cortex associated with social cognition, particularly the thoughts and intentions of others, activated along with another part of the cortex associated with reward.