Citation

Yu R, Wu X. Ergonomics 2015; 58(6): 857-865.

Affiliation

a Department of Industrial Engineering , Tsinghua University , Beijing , P.R. China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/00140139.2014.993429

PMID

25554925

Abstract

This study investigated whether the mere presence of a human audience would evoke a social facilitation effect in baggage X-ray security screening tasks. A 2 (target presence: present vs. absent) ×  2 (task complexity: simple vs. complex) ×  2 (social presence: alone vs. human audience) within-subject experiment simulating a real baggage screening task was conducted. This experiment included 20 male participants. The participants' search performance in this task was recorded. The results showed that the presence of a human audience speeded up responses in simple tasks and slowed down responses in complex tasks. However, the social facilitation effect produced by the presence of a human audience had no effect on response accuracy. These findings suggested that the complexity of screening tasks should be considered when designing work organisation modes for security screening tasks.

Language: en