Self-Monitoring Tendency and Audience Effects: The role of ego depletion in Stroop Task performance

Social facilitation effects (defined as the broad idea that the presence of others has ‘facilitating’ effects on an individual’s performance, evoking positive or negative outcomes) have varying positive and negative effects on an individual’s performance in social situations. As a result of attentional conflicts in social contexts, some individuals experience “ego depletion” which adversely affects their performance in completing a challenging task. Ego depletion occurs as limited cognitive resources (i.e., attention span) are consumed by attention, inhibiting their performance. Self-monitoring tendency has been identified as a personality factor which directly relates to the extent to which people use cognitive resources to interpret social contexts. The current study sought to explore this relationship, hypothesizing high self-monitoring tendency (those individuals who are more motivated to attend to and interpret social contexts) is related to worse performance on a challenging task due to self-monitoring behaviors spending cognitive resources. A computerized version of the Stroop task was used to measure performance on a challenging task and an observer was sometimes watching participants to induce social facilitation effects. Results showed low self-monitors in the observed condition performed better on the challenging task compared to high self-monitors. There was no significant difference between performance in observed and control conditions among high self-monitors. While the results show initial evidence that low self-monitors were able to escape some negative effects of social facilitation and perform better, high variance among these results prevent a definitive conclusion from being drawn from this sample.