According to F. H. Allport's concept of social facilitation, memorizing a list of numbers is done best when the person is:

• A. Perform worse in a group
• B. Perform better if part of a group
• C. Perform the same when alone
• D. Perform poorly regardless of group

Answer: (B)

Allport’s social facilitation idea is that the presence of others creates arousal that strengthens your dominant response. Whether this helps or hinders depends on how easy the task is or how well you’ve learned it. For simple or well-practiced tasks, the dominant response is likely to be correct, so performance improves when others are watching or present. Memorizing a list of numbers is a relatively straightforward, practiced task for many people, so being in a group would boost performance rather than hinder it. That’s why the best outcome is performing better in a group.

The other possibilities don’t fit as well because they imply that the presence of others would either have no effect or hurt the performance on a simple task, which runs counter to Allport’s observation that group presence often facilitates easy tasks rather than complicating them.