Will an Individual’s Performance Be Affected by Audience Expectations?

This study addresses the effects of audience expectations on an individual’s performance. It was proposed that individuals who perceive low expectations from the audience will perform better than those who perceive high expectations or who are working alone without an audience. We also hypothesized that participants performing alone would perform better than those who perceived high audience expectations. To test these hypotheses, 30 subjects participated in an experiment where they were asked to work on two rounds of an anagram test. The presence of an audience holding high and low expectations was replaced by the presence of a video camera. The results partially supported the hypothesis. Individuals in the low-expectation condition performed better than those in the alone condition. However, there were no significant differences between the low-expectation and high-expectation conditions and the alone and high-expectation conditions. These findings indicate that the presence of an audience might encourage a person to perform better and that the perception of an audience with low expectations might push individuals to further excellence.