The resemblance of people and cockroaches. • Desteni - Group of people exploring Equality & Oneness principles

In an experiment about social facilitation, they concluded this is not just a human activity.
Zajong and his colleagues (1969) placed cockroaches in a bright lighted box that was connected to a dark box with a tube.
They looked at the time the light-avoiding cockroaches needed to flee to the safe, dark box.
According to expectations, the cockroaches walked faster in couples then alone in this condition.
De tube to the dark box was straight en the animals just had to walk straight ahead.

They made a more complex setting, the tube had an angle of 90 degrees. The cockroaches did better in tis setting alone than in pairs.
The same pattern of results was found when there were spectators: this were the cockroaches placed in transparent “spectator boxes” made from plexi glass on both sides of the maze. This “audience” cause social facilitation in the simple condition.

è So when spectators were present, the cockroaches in the simple first condition did better in pairs than alone.


This resembles the studies done on humans, where the presence of others have a big effect on ones performance and behavior.