Discussion
The results of this study confirm our hypothesis that muscle grip fatigue time increases when in competition with another individual (p = 0.0097).
- Muscle grip fatigue time nearly doubled when in competition with another individual.
Findings
These results of a longer fatigue time while in competition can be partially explained by a study done by Scott and Cherrington which stated that those in competitive contingency produce more and report higher levels of physiological arousal than those in individualistic contingencies (Scott and Cherrington 1974).
When competing in individual settings, there is less of a motivation to sustain effort as there is no one to compare abilities to, which is why subjects in this study exhibited such a shorter muscle fatigue time for all participants during their initial individual trial.
This tiring of muscle can be attributed to the fact that skeletal muscle force production depends on contractile mechanisms, and failure at any of these sites can contribute to the development muscle of fatigue as observed the longer subjects squeeze the hand dynamometer (Wan et al. 2017).
Sources of Error
A source of error could be the smaller sample size that this data was collected from. The sample size consisted of college-aged students (majority of which were African American) which means that findings in this sample size could be different than findings of a sample size that consists of middle-aged individuals or senior citizens.
Although our hypothesis was supported by our data, further research could be done on a larger sample size with a larger demographic of people to determine whether the data found would remain consistent.
Real World Relevance and Conclusion
This study not only looks at the physiology behind why our muscle does not fatigue as quickly when in competition, but also the psychology behind it as well, which can be applied to the real world when playing sports or even while working out at the gym.
- The social comparison theory centers on the belief that people have an innate drive to evaluate themselves, often in comparison to others and with this experiment we tested just that (Van Lange et al. 2011).​
Our research indicates that competition of some sort is important when wanting to increase the time your muscles can work before they become exhausted and through this experiment you can see why this has prevalence in everyday life.