School of Social Sciences
Master Course in Psychology, 30hp PS5424, Spring 2008
Loafing
F
Master Course in Psychology, 30hpoafing in the Audience or
Fear in the Speaker
Author: Elmira Yazdi Supervisor: Andrejs Ozolins Examinor: Abdul Mohammed
Author: Elmira Yazdi : Andrejs Ozolins
Abstract
This exploratory study examined the relationship between public speaking anxiety levels indicated by scores on the Personal Report of Confidence as a Speaker questionnaire (PRCS: Paul, 1966) and evaluation probability on a wide domain of evaluation items reflected by scores on the Audience Attention Allocation questionnaire (devised for the purpose of this study). A large student sample (n=220) completed the PRCS as well as the AAA
questionnaire. The AAA assessed the perceived allocation of the attentional resources of the audience members during a speech by asking respondents to rate how probable it is that a speaker is evaluated on a set of domains. The results of regression analyses indicated that AAA scores, Gender, and Study year were significant predictors of PRCS scores accounting for 8.5% of the variance. More interestingly, the nature of results obtained was contrary to the hypothesis of the study. It was in fact revealed that subjects scoring low on the AAA
Public speaking is considered one of the most valued skills that an individual can possess and many careers require some ability in public speaking. Nevertheless, fear of public speaking which is a form of social phobia, is one of the most common phobias. In fact, statistics show that fear of public speaking is one of the highest ranked fears, even before fear of dying -affecting as much as 75% of the general population (Furmark, 2000). Accumulated research has identified multiple factors in explaining the underlying processes and maintenance of social phobias. These include distorted perceptions and cognitive processes (Clark & Wells, 1995), biased attention to social threat (Mogg & Bradley, 2002; Mogg, Philippot, & Bradley, 2004), excessive attention to internal physiological cues (Bogels & Mansell, 2004), negative interpretations of ambiguous social events (Amir, Foa, & Coles, 1998; Moscovitch & Hoffman, 2006), negative self-images (Hackmann, Clark, & McManus, 2000),
underestimation of social performance and overestimation of the visibility of anxiety (Wallace & Alden, 1997), fear of negative evaluation (Rapee & Heimberg, 1997), which further results in post-event rumination (Mellings & Alden, 2000) or avoidance and safety behaviors (Wells, Clark, Salkovskis, Ludgate, Hackmann, & Gelder, 1995).
However, many of the proposed influential factors such as negative self-image or fear of negative evaluation can be very maladaptive and have many damaging consequences. But such destructive patterns are not observed in the general population despite of our active role in the act of speaking. Perhaps these factors do not pose a significant and disruptive impact in speaking with other individuals, but it is when the awareness of one’s negative attributes is resurfaced by being in a public situation such as giving a public speech, where others may have the possibility to discover them and further make dispositional inferences and evaluations about us, that they may play a role in affecting anxiety levels.
It is necessary to note that people engage in speaking with familiar as well as unfamiliar others on a daily basis and do not report this act as being fearful. It is however in ‘public’ situations that anxiety levels are heightened. Therefore, it becomes essential to explore the notion of ‘public’ and its associations in order to better understand the variety of underlying factors which influence anxiety levels. One such association is the concept of social loafing.
of motivation as one may perceive one’ s own individual contribution to be of a low value or dispensable (Shepperd, 1993); the withholding of effort because others are perceived as doing so also, such that one does not wish to be perceived as the ‘sucker’ (Robbins, 1995);
expectations of the performance of one’s co-workers (Williams & Karau, 1991); reward incentives (Shepperd & Wright, 1989); and a diffusion of individual responsibility for subsequent outcomes (Weldon & Gargano, 1988).
A number of studies have examined information sharing during group decision making (e.g., Cruz, Boster, & Rodriguez, 1997; Schittekatte & Van Hiel, 1996; Stewart, Billings, & Stasser, 1998). It has been revealed from these studies that groups often fail to discuss unshared information or information held by a single group member. One interesting study by Stewart et al. (1998) however showed that groups who believed they would be held accountable for their decisions exerted more effort by having longer discussions than non-accountable groups.
Furthermore, Henningsen and Miller (2000) examined the effects of social loafing in group decision making. In their study, participants were asked to read information in order to make a future individual or group decision. Decision type (intellective or judgmental) and anticipated group size (individuals or 4 or 8 members) were manipulated to examine their effect on information recall. They found that information recall was lower when individuals anticipated making a decision in four- or eight-member groups than in anticipation to make a decision individually. Moreover, it was observed that individuals who believed they were making intellective decisions recalled more information than those who believed they were making judgmental decisions. These findings suggest that individuals exert less effort to encode information in anticipation of group decision making, in particular judgmental decision types. The results however failed to show significant information recall differences between the four- and eight-person groups. Nevertheless, the authors justify this observation with reference to Latané's (1981) social impact theory, according to which the impact of additional group members decreases with each additional member.
groups would generate more words per person than the individuals working in larger groups. These predictions were confirmed as the mean number of words produced by each individual participant working in a group of three was 13.86 words, whereas the mean value for individual participants working in groups of eight was 6.75 words. The results indicated that individuals working within the smaller groups were more productive than those working in larger groups, consistent with the social loafing hypothesis.
Social loafing in a public speech setting may be exhibited by observers/audience members in exerting less attention to the speech being given, and rather divert their attentional resources towards other domains such as personal attributes of the speaker. Consequently, individuals who are to give a public speech and are aware of such processes occurring in the audience, as they themselves may have exhibited similar behaviour, experience high levels of anxiety as they fear that their personal attributes may be negatively evaluated.
METHOD Participants
220 students at Växjö University participated in the study. They were selected from 3 main departments, namely Social Sciences, Natural sciences, and Health and Social Care. Subjects completed a Swedish translation of the Personal Report of Confidence as a Speaker
Questionnaire (PRCS: Paul, 1966) measuring fear of public speaking, as well as an Audience Attention Allocation Questionnaire (see Appendix) which was devised to assess the perceived allocation of the attentional resources of the audience members during a speech. Data were also collected on a number of additional variables: Gender, Age, Study field, and Study year. The participants consisted of 111 males and 109 females. The age of the students ranged from 19 to 50, with a mean of 24 years, S.D. = 5.71. Forty seven percent were enrolled in Social Sciences, 42% in Natural Sciences, and 11% in the Health and Social Care. First-year students comprised 42% of the total sample, with second-year students forming 48%, and the
remaining 10% were third- or upper year students.
Questionnaires
Personal Report of Confidence as a Speaker (PRCS). The PRCS questionnaire is a 30-item self-report measure designed to assess the degree of apprehension in individuals across three time dimensions: before, during, and after delivering a speech. The questionnaire is based on 30 statements, each with a true/false response to be circled by the individual. Scores range from 0 to 30, with higher scores indicating higher anxiety. The measure demonstrates high internal consistency (Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 value = .91) (Klorman, Weerts, Hastings, Melamed, & Lang, 1974) and adequate validity (Lombardo, 1988).
various possible domains of evaluation which may be apprehended. More specifically, the list involves evaluation items concerning attributes, skills, and abilities on an intellectual,
physical, personal/intrinsic, as well as social level. Furthermore, social loafing research asserts that individuals tend to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually (Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Thus, it is possible that in a public speech setting this may be exhibited by observers/audience members in exerting less attention to the speech being given, and instead divert their attentional resources towards other
domains. Increasing audience sizes hence may lead to higher levels of loafing by the audience members, and thereby result in greater number of dimensions for attentional allocation. This further implies increased number and diversity of evaluation domains, consequently increased number of evaluations, and possibly an increased likelihood of criticism, disapproval, or negative evaluation, which finally may result in heightened levels of anxiety in the speaker. Therefore, to investigate this proposition and further our understanding of the evaluation concerns of the speech anxious individual and the conditions which may influence their manifestations, the AAA questionnaire comprising various evaluation domains and varying audience sizes was constructed. More specifically, the AAA questionnaire consists of 22 domain items (e.g. appearance, physical coordination, language fluency) and 3 cross items (audience group size). It uses the Likert scale and involves rating the level of likelihood on a scale from 1 (Very Unlikely) to 4 (Very Likely), for the 22 items across the 3 different
audience group sizes (1, 5, and 200). Items are summed and a maximum score of 88 indicates high probability that the audience members are evaluating the speaker on the various
dimensions, whereas a minimum score of 22 indicates low probability that the audience is evaluating the speaker on these factors. This questionnaire generates 3 outputs for each subject, namely an AAA score for each audience group size.
The AAA questionnaire possesses a high level of internal consistency, revealed by a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.85.
Procedure
RESULTS
The mean PRCS score for the entire sample was 11.94, with a standard deviation of 6.56. Means and standard deviations of PRCS scores were also calculated according to gender, study year and study field. These data are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1
Means and Standard Deviations of PRCS scores for Predictor Variables
_____________________________________________________________________ Variable M SD _____________________________________________________________________ Gender Males 10.91 5.47 Females 12.71 7.36 __________________________________________________________________ Study Year 1 11.84 5.63 2 12.64 7.24 3 and above 7.59 4.62 _____________________________________________________________________ Study Field Social Sciences 11.46 6.94 Natural Sciences 11.67 5.50 Health and Social Care 13.74 8.04
_______________________________________________________________
The distribution of PRCS scores in the total sample is positively skewed and platykurtic. The skewness and kurtosis coefficients are 3.14 and – 1.31 respectively. Ranking transformation of the data was made in order to obtain a normal distribution.
Due to lack of significant differences between AAA1 and AAA5, an average of the two variables was calculated for further analysis of the data. The new variable is named AAA15 and may be thought of as “small audience” group in relation to AAA200 which is considered a “large audience” group.
Multiple regression analysis was performed and using the enter method, a significant model emerged (F4, 210 = 5.564, p<0.001). Adjusted R square = 0.085. Significant variables are shown in Table 2.
Table 2
The relationship between PRCS score and AAA15 failed to reach significance at p=0.05. Nevertheless an inversely dependent relation may be observed as is revealed by beta= - 0.107 at p=0.13 level. The negative correlation indicates that lower scores on AAA15 are matched with increasing PRCS scores. A significant relationship however was observed between PRCS scores and AAA200 (p=0.013) with beta= - 0.177. This relation was also negatively correlated indicating that lower scores on AAA200 predicts higher PRCS scores, in other words, greater levels of anxiety. Significance was also observed between PRCS scores and Gender (p=0.032) indicating that females’ PRCS scores are higher than for males. Moreover, PRCS scores and Study year were inversely correlated (p=0.047). The negative relation (beta= - 0.134) suggests that PRCS scores tend to decrease with increasing study years. Data analysis also revealed a significant difference between AAA15 and AAA200 scores F (1, 218) = 25.128, p < 0.005. Higher mean scores were observed for AAA200, indicating that audience members in larger audience groups are more likely to evaluate the speaker on a variety of domains than the audience members in a smaller audience group. A positive correlation (r = 0.361) was found between AAA15 and AAA200.
Moreover, in order to elucidate the core findings of the study, additional analyses were conducted. Particularly, students’ PRCS scores were ranked and data selections were made of the 30 highest scoring subjects (High Anxiety), and the 30 lowest scoring subjects (Low Anxiety). Three subjects were further eliminated due to missing values on the AAA questionnaire. The mean PRCS score in the ‘High Anxiety’ group was 23.77 (SD = 2.49) while the ‘Low Anxiety’ group had a mean of 2.85 (SD = 1.03). Mean scores on the AAA questionnaire for the different anxiety groups are shown in table 3.
Table 3
Means and Standard Deviations of AAA scores
_______________________________________________________________________ AAA15 __ AAA200 AAA Total Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD
A one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted comparing AAA scores (AAA15, AAA200, AAA Total) and Anxiety Levels. The analysis revealed a significant effect of Anxiety Level on AAA scores, in line with previous results. Correlations were calculated between AAA scores and Anxiety Levels. A significant negative correlation was found between Anxiety Level and AAA15 scores (r = - 0.310, n = 57, p = 0.019); a negative
correlation between Anxiety Level and AAA200 scores (r = - 0.258, n = 57, p = 0.053); and a significant negative correlation between Anxiety Level and AAA total scores (r = - 0.332, n = 57, p = 0.012).
DISCUSSION
The current study was one of the first to systematically investigate the implications of social loafing in a public speech setting. A hypothesis was put forward in attempting to account for the high prevalence of fear of public speaking in the general population. More specifically, it was hypothesized that larger audiences generate fear/anxiety in many people anticipating to give a public speech, as there is a greater level of loafing manifest in larger audiences. This successively may contribute to a greater number of dimensions for attentional allocation, and thus increased evaluation domains. Increasing number of evaluation domains implies increasing number of evaluations, which consequently suggests increased likelihood of criticism, disapproval, or negative evaluation. This in turn, results in high levels of anxiety in anticipation of giving a public speech. It was therefore predicted that higher scores on the AAA questionnaire would predict higher scores on the PRCS questionnaire, in other words, the higher probability an individual would assign to being evaluated on the various evaluation domains, the greater fear he/she would have of public speaking.
These rather surprising results however must be dealt with some caution. Firstly, it is important to note that these results are based on self-report questionnaires and may not accurately reflect socially anxious individuals’ perceptions of the audience.
Further interpretations may also be made based on theories of defense mechanisms (e.g. Cramer, 1991; Freud, 1936).
It has been argued that individuals develop defense mechanisms as they serve the purpose of mitigating the individual’s anxiety, guilt, shame, grief, humiliation, remorse, embarrassment, or other painful feelings (Dorpat, 1987). This process which largely occurs outside of a person’s awareness is an automatic reaction, rather than a more considerate choice, to a perceived threat.
One defense mechanism in particular is the theory of denial. Moore and Fine (1968) define denial as a ‘defense mechanism by which conscious recognition of information is blocked’. They further claim that denial can be a very useful defense mechanism as it may help protect the individual from certain experiences that are highly upsetting or pose potential damage to their self-esteem. Cramer (1991) goes on to expatiate the broad definition of denial and outlines several forms of denial: perceptual defenses, constructing personal fantasies, negation, minimizing, maximizing, ridicule, and reversal.
Thus, it seems probable that the participants in the current study may have exhibited similar defense mechanisms. Individuals, who had higher scores on the PRCS questionnaire indicating greater fear of public speaking, may have negated the evaluation concerns that they experience in such settings by assigning lower probability to the evaluation items on the AAA questionnaire, and thereby expressing that it is unlikely that audience members make evaluations about the speaker on these items. Alternatively, the lower
estimations of evaluation probability on the various items may reflect fantasy construction or wishful thinking of the individual as a way to deny the possible threats of being negatively evaluated.
Moreover, accumulated research on cognition reveals a significant influence of desire on cognitive processes such as perception (Boon & Davies, 1996), likelihood
Thus, in accordance with the research evidence outlined above, the results in the current study need not be surprising. Rather, consistent support is found which helps to explain the intriguing findings of this paper.
Limitations and Future Research
The present study examined fear of public speaking in a sample of university students by asking them to fill out the Personal Report of Confidence as a Speaker questionnaire (Paul, 1966) which asks respondents to recall their feelings associated with their most recent speech. It should be noted that students were selected from three different departments which vary on a number of factors such as size, structure, and nature, and consequently may affect outcome measures. For example, the size of classes in the natural sciences department is smaller than the social sciences department and the composition of classes in the natural sciences
department tends to be male dominant. These variations in conditions thus may results in improper comparisons and inferences of data.
Another limitation was the time constraints and the lengthy nature of the
questionnaire administered to the students at the start or end of class which may have resulted in careless responding.
The false consensus effect (Gross & Miller, 1977) is the tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people, that is, to see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and assume that everyone else thinks the same way they do. Thus, future research should investigate the relationship between an individual’s attention allocation as an audience member and his/her perceived audience attention allocation as a speaker.
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APPENDIX
Audience Attention Allocation Questionnaire
I. Offentlig Uppmärksamhet
Föreställ Dig att Du ska ge muntliga presentationer av ett forskningsprojekt som Du har genomfört (ex. uppsats), med en presentation för varje gruppstorlek av åhörare som beskrivs i tabellen nedan (1, 5, eller 200 personer). Alla åhörargrupper består av studenter men är alltså av varierande storlek. Vänligen läs varje påstående noggrant och försök att svara så uppriktigt som möjligt; men försök att inte använda för mycket tid för att fundera över varje påstående.
För varje åhörargrupp, vänligen ange sannolikheten för att varje påstående stämmer genom att skriva en siffra mellan ”1” till ”4” i rätt ruta, enligt den här skalan:
Åhörargruppens storlek
Medan jag talar, bedömer åhörarna: 1 5 200
1. Talets innehåll (materialet som jag presenterar) 2. Min dialekt
3. Mitt språk (‘flyt’; hur jag finner orden) 4. Mitt uttal/artikulation
5. Min grammatik
6. Min fysiska ‘framträdande’ 7. Mina kläder
8. Mitt civilstånd (singel, alt. sammanlevande) 9. Min intellektuella förmåga
10. Min kreativia förmåga 11. Min sexuella läggning 12. Min trovärdighet
13. Min kognitiva förmåga (“intelligens”) 14. Min sociala förmåga
15. Mitt utseende
