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Do you perform tasks better when people are watching?

Researchers show that chimps perform better at difficult tasks when there is a human audience …

MARTINA NICOLLS

Nov 11

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How do people perform in front of other people? Often people perform better at tasks when others are watching – such as during a sporting event or a spelling competition – because humans live in a reputation-based society. However, it is also the case that people perform worse at tasks when others are watching because they get distracted or because it makes them anxious or nervous. So, humans perform either better than expected or worse than expected in front of other people.

I might perform better at a charity fun run with people watching than if I were trotting around the block in the morning darkness. Would I perform better at writing my next novel if people were watching? Absolutely not!

Chimpanzees perform better at difficult tasks when there is a human audience, say researchers at Kyoto University primate research institute in Japan, published in iScience in November 2024.

Researcher Christen Lin and his colleagues studied a group of six common chimpanzees (Pan troglodyte), a primate mammal in the Pongidae family of great apes. Great apes are not monkeys. They are related to gorillas, orangutans, and humans, sharing 98.6% of human DNA.

The researchers tested the six chimpanzees on three numerical tasks with varying difficulty from easy to hard. The chimps were tested thousands of times over six years in front of audiences of one to eight humans. They knew some of the humans and the other humans they had not seen before.

The first task (the easiest) included a screen with the numbers 1 to 5 in random locations. The chimps were instructed to touch the numbers in the correct order to get a food reward. The second task (more difficult) included a screen with the numbers that were not sequential (for example, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 15) in random locations. The chimps were instructed to touch the numbers from smallest to largest to get a food reward. The third task (the hardest) included a screen with hidden numbers. For example, when the first number was touched, the other numbers on the screen disappeared. The chimps had to memorize the location of the numbers to touch them in the correct order to get a food reward.

The results showed that on the easiest task the chimps performed worse when there were more humans watching them. On the hardest task the chimps performed better as the number of human audience members grew – the more humans watching them the better they performed.

Researcher Christen Lin said the results suggest that an audience may motivate the chimps to perform even better at complex tasks due to the humans being a stressor that motivates them to perform at their best.

But what if other chimps were watching them? How would they perform in front of their parents, their loved ones, their competitive males, an all-female group, or in front of their baby chimps? I wonder!