Why does an audience impact sport performance?

When people watch, something measurable happens to athletes. For some performers an audience is like fuel: they tighten up, focus and often improve. For others the crowd seems to turn up the pressure and performance falls away. The simple way to understand this is that being watched changes arousal and attention, and those two things have different effects depending on the performer and the task.

Arousal is the brain-and-body state of being alert, ready and keyed up. The long-standing Yerkes–Dodson law says there is an optimal level of arousal for any task: too little and people are bored and sloppy, too much and they get anxious and make mistakes (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). For easy, well-practised actions that optimal arousal is higher than for hard, complex skills that need fine control. So when an audience increases arousal, experts doing simple, automatic parts of their sport can get a helpful boost, whereas someone doing a tricky skill that needs calm precision can overshoot the optimum and struggle. This explains why the same audience can lift one athlete and derail another.

The classic social psychology account builds on that arousal idea and adds the idea of dominant responses. When others are present the performer’s arousal rises; that increases the likelihood of the response they would most automatically produce — their dominant response. If the dominant response is the correct, well-mastered action, the crowd can improve performance. If the dominant response is an error or a half-learned movement, then the crowd will amplify that mistake. This pattern has been shown in lab work and in field studies of athletes. One famous example looked at pool players: experienced players did better when watched, while novices did worse (Michaels et al., 1982). That neatly captures the “watching helps experts, hurts novices” pattern that coaches see all the time (Zajonc, 1965).

That said, “presence” is not one thing. Social psychologists have tested whether mere presence of others is enough, or whether athletes must feel evaluated. Evaluation apprehension theory argues it is the sense of being judged that really matters — the idea that people care what observers think and that this concern raises arousal. Experiments separating people who are merely nearby from people who can evaluate the performer show that evaluative audiences are especially powerful in producing performance changes (Cottrell et al., 1968). In other words, a quiet crowd that doesn’t feel threatening may not do much, but a crowd that clearly appraises or criticises will change things a lot.

There is also a separate but related phenomenon often framed as choking under pressure. That literature focuses on how anxiety or self-consciousness changes attention. For highly practised skills, thinking too much about execution — putting deliberate focus on the step-by-step movements that are normally automatic — actually disrupts those well-learned processes. Athletes who “over-monitor” themselves in front of others can break a smooth routine into staccato, error-prone steps. Research has shown this in a range of settings: when stakes and self-consciousness rise, performance on complex, fine-motor skills can drop (Baumeister, 1984; Beilock & Carr, 2001). That helps explain why some athletes collapse in big moments even though they train flawlessly.

Why training and practice feel different to competition is a key piece of the puzzle. Practice contexts often lack the social-evaluative elements of competition: fewer spectators, less explicit judgement, and lower consequences. In training, an athlete’s dominant responses are shaped and reinforced without the spike in arousal and self-focus that a crowd brings. That is why an action that looks effortless in the gym can become fragile under the bright lights. Meta-analytic work has shown that the effects of audiences are reliable across hundreds of studies, making it clear that presence-of-others is a stable influence on behaviour, not just occasional happenstance (Bond & Titus, 1983).

Putting the science into practice for athletes and coaches starts with diagnosis and then intervention. First, determine whether an athlete’s problem around audiences is arousal-related (too much or too little) or attention-related (explicit monitoring or distraction). For someone who benefits from higher arousal, using energising routines and crowd-facing rituals can help. For someone who collapses under scrutiny, strategies that reduce self-focus — such as pre-performance routines that anchor attention on external cues, acceptance-based approaches that normalise anxiety, or training that taxes working memory so athletes stop overthinking — have strong evidence behind them (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Baumeister, 1984). Practising under pressure, including evaluation and realistic crowd noise, helps desensitise athletes and builds robustness. Importantly, it’s not a one-size-fits-all fix: even elite athletes differ in their optimal arousal and attentional style, so interventions should be tailored and tested.

In short, people watching change sport performance because watching changes arousal and attention, and those changes interact with skill level and task complexity. When an athlete’s automatic, dominant responses are correct, an audience tends to help; when those responses are fragile or the task needs tight control, an audience can hurt. Coaches can close the gap between training and competition by deliberately adding the social-evaluative and arousal features of real contests into practice, while athletes can learn attentional and acceptance-based strategies to keep performance stable when the crowd is watching.

Take-home points

An audience raises arousal, which can help or hinder depending on the athlete’s skill level and the task.

Experts usually benefit from being watched, while novices or athletes doing complex, fine-motor tasks may struggle.

It isn’t just presence, but the sense of being judged, that really affects performance.

Choking under pressure often happens when athletes overthink skills that are usually automatic.

Training without pressure does not always translate into competition – building crowd or evaluation elements into practice helps.

Strategies such as pre-performance routines, external focus, and acceptance of nerves can reduce the negative effects of audiences.

References

Baumeister, R. F. (1984). Choking under pressure: Self‐consciousness and paradoxical effects of incentives on skillful performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(3), 610–620.

Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701–725.

Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94(2), 265–292.

Cottrell, N. B., Wack, D. L., Sekerak, G. J., & Rittle, R. H. (1968). Social facilitation of dominant responses by the presence of an audience and the mere presence of others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(3), 245–250.

Michaels, J. W., Blommel, J. M., Brocato, R. M., Linkous, S. H., & Rowe, J. S. (1982). Social facilitation in a natural setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 100–109.

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 459–482.

Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269–274.