In contrast with R. B. Zajonc's (1965) classic view about social facilitation-inhibition (SFI) effects, it was found that the presence of relatively unpredictable audiences and forced social comparison with a slightly superior coactor both facilitated performance in the Stroop task while inhibiting automatic verbal processing. Not only do these findings reveal that social presence can help inhibit the emission of dominant responses, providing further support for an attentional view of SFI effects, but they also demonstrate the power of social situations over what has been thought to be invariant automatic processing. As such, they are inconsistent with the view reiterated in more than 500 articles on Stroop interference over the past 60 years and suggest that more attention should be paid to the situations in which cognition takes place.The situations in which human beings perceive, manipulate, and interpret information have traditionally been neglected by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists in general. According to Levine, Resnick, and Higgins (1993), the recognition of the importance of domain-specific knowledge led cognitive psychologists to take a first step toward a possible inclusion of social factors as part of cognition. This first step, however, did not specifically involve social factors but "did highlight how particular, how situated or contextualized, cognition always is" (Levine et al., 1993, p. 586). As Levine et al. noted, it is in fact necessary to attend not only to knowledge elements but also to the conditions of their use, that is, the situations in which cognition takes place.In this article our purpose is to show that even relatively simple social situations can have dramatic effects on some basic cognitive responses that have been well established in psychology. Specifically, we argue that the presence of other people can help dominate processes that are viewed as uncontrollable in the Stroop task, suggesting that more can be learned about cognition when studying it in its social context. Interest in the way social presence affects cognition has a long history in social psychology. Under the . Electronic mail may be sent to huguet@cicsun.univ-bpclermont.fr. label social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965), it has been found that audiences and coactors affect individual performance, sometimes facilitating it and sometimes impeding it (see Bond & Titus, 1983;Geen, 1989Geen, , 1991Guerin, 1993, for reviews). In this area, however, it is generally assumed that automatic or dominant response tendencies are facilitated by the presence of others. In contrast with this, our findings in the context of the Stroop task reveal that social facilitation can sometimes result from an inhibition of such tendencies, providing further support for a neglected, attentional view of social facilitation-inhibition (SFI) effects. SFI EffectsAccording to Bond and Titus's (1983) meta-analysis of 241 studies, social presence (a) increases the speed of well-learned, simple task performance but decreases the speed ...

No abstract