Other People Boost Your Performance

Is people's behavior best explained by the environment and situation they find themselves in, or by their personality, which guides behavior no matter what the situation is?

Have you ever felt under pressure with an audience present? Pushed yourself to do better? To avoid failure and embarrassment? This is social facilitation theory.
In Social Psychology, one of the dominant themes is that situations affect our behavior. Human are social creatures and our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence of others. A person's behavioral pattern may change depending on whether one is appreciated by others or not. We call it social facilitation, which is the tendency for people to do better on tasks when in the presence of other people. Have you ever performed in front of the audience and ended up doing things you never could imagine? We also might notice in our daily lives that whenever people are being watched by others, they will do well or even better than usual on things that they are already good at doing.
It’s shown that when in the presence of other people, we automatically become alert, or aroused (this instinctive response was useful to ancestors for their survival). The body’s usual response in such situations is called the dominant response. People are aroused as a result of being watched by others. Arousal brings out the dominant response in a person. Hence, if a person is performing an easy task (or easy to them) in front of others, then the arousal will bring out the dominant response (i.e. a good response). If a person is performing a difficult task in front of others, the arousal will still bring out the dominant response, which in this case is a bad response (i.e. the person will perform badly).
Many psychologists have done many experiments to show this is what happens. Michaels et al and zajonic both found that an audience present changes the way we perform. Zajonic even tested it with other creatures such as cockroaches to conclude it is preset in all living species.