Distraction Conflict

On the year of 1978, Glenn Sanders, Robert Baron, and Danny Moore carry evaluation apprehension a step farther and discover another approach to social facilitation effect which is the distraction conflict theory. According to distraction conflict theory, it’s neither alertness nor evaluation apprehension that causes the physiological arousal that leads to social facilitation effect, but conflict experienced between the task at hand and attending to others in the immediate surroundings. They suggest that when other people are watching us, our performance is affected by the attentional conflict between the task we are performing and the watching others. When the task is easy we can successfully narrow down our focus to the task at hand and perform well whereas when the task is difficult, we suffer from attentional overload and our performance gets worse.

Unsurprisingly, there are several source of distraction might affect students’ performances in the class presentations. One of it will be audience response. Facial expressions, gesture or posture that showing approval or disapproval by the audience can be some sort of distraction that affect the student performance. If the presentation is easy task for the student, they will be able to perform well. This is because of they feel confident with their point and therefore won’t so easily distracted by the audience reaction. However, if presentation is difficult task for them, they will feel more tension and stressed under the observation and response showed by the audience and will impairs their performance.

Other than that, presence of opposite sex audience will be another kind of distraction that may alter the student’s presentation performance. People usually find opposite sex audiences more distracting. For instance, men are more inhibited on difficult tasks but better on well-practiced and easy tasks when watched by women and vice versa. With the presence of female audience, if presentation is easy for the male presenter, he will definitely perform well. He will perform even better to impress the female audience. Conversely if presentation is difficult for him, he will tend to feel embarrassing, shame and nervous with the presence of female audience and perform poor.

Apart from that, moods whether good moods or bad moods may facilitate performance on easy task but inhibit performance on difficult task. For example, before getting into the presentation, you discover good news that you accidentally