What is body doubling, and why does it help people focus?
How a century of research on company and performance explains why working beside someone can help, and which tasks it suits.
Answer to the question
What is body doubling, and why does it help people focus?
Body doubling is working alongside another person who does their own task, in the room or on video. It helps people focus because company can sharpen effort on tasks already within reach, as social facilitation research has shown for over a century, though the effect is small and tasks needing fresh thinking can suffer.
Key takeaways
- Body doubling borrows from social facilitation, the finding that the presence of others changes performance, traced in Jonah Berger's Invisible Influence to Norman Triplett's work in the late 1800s.
- Robert Zajonc's 1965 account holds that company raises arousal, which strengthens the strongest response: helpful on practised tasks, unhelpful on new or hard ones.
- A 1983 meta-analysis of 241 studies by Bond and Titus found others speed up simple tasks and slow complex ones, with small effects.
- In five studies, Shteynberg and colleagues (2014) found group attention increased the share of thoughts devoted to a video, an effect not explained by arousal, contagion or vicarious experience.
- Studies that use the label body doubling for a working session are few, so the case rests on neighbouring work.
This article is general information about research on working alongside other people and on how company changes performance. It is not medical advice, and nothing in it is a reason to change any treatment or to stop seeking care. Speak to a GP or another clinician about your own health. Medical review: Reja Batool.
Body doubling is the habit of working beside someone busy with their own task so that a stubborn job gets started and finished, and it is the newest form of a question Norman Triplett put to cyclists and reel-winding children in the late nineteenth century: does another person nearby change how well someone works? The label is recent, but the question is more than a century old, and its research history explains both why body doubling can help people focus and why it will not suit every task.
The question began with cyclists, reels and cockroaches long ago
Jonah Berger's Invisible Influence traces the question to Triplett, who in the closing years of the nineteenth century looked at racing cyclists and at children winding fishing reels and reported that people tended to do better with others around than alone. Triplett's paper became the first name on a long list of studies of what is now called social facilitation, the effect of company on performance.
The list did not stay tidy. Berger sets out how later studies pointed in both directions, with company helping on some tasks and hurting on others. Robert Zajonc resolved the split in the nineteen-sixties with an account built on arousal. The presence of others raises arousal, and arousal strengthens whichever response is already strongest. On a well-practised task that response is the right one, so performance improves. On a new or hard task it is the wrong one, so performance suffers. Berger describes Zajonc's later test with cockroaches, which ran a straight track faster with other roaches watching and ran a maze more slowly.
Nobody coached the cockroaches, which makes plain presence a candidate cause on its own, a theme that returns in The Invisible Weight of Belonging.
This is the first thing body doubling borrows, and the borrowing is specific. A job a person can already do, such as clearing a backlog of messages, sorting files or copying out notes, is the kind of task the arousal account says company should favour. A job that needs fresh thinking is the kind it says company can make harder. So in body doubling the choice of task matters as much as the choice of companion.
A pooled analysis of 241 studies sized the effect
By 1983 the literature was big enough to be pooled. Charles Bond and L. J. Titus gathered 241 studies of how the presence of others affects human task performance and physiology. Their review found that others speed up performance on simple tasks and slow it on complex ones, that accuracy is impaired on complex tasks and slightly improved on simple ones, and that arousal rises mainly on complex tasks. The effects were small, accounting for only a tiny fraction of the variation in a typical experiment. The authors also noted that unreported null results could be missing from the literature.
Small does not mean absent. It means company is one lever among several, and that is a fair way to set expectations for body doubling: a companion may help a little with a task already within reach, and a session is likely to work best when other things are in place, such as a clear first step and a set time.
A task matched to a person's skill is the territory covered in What is flow state, and it is the same match the facilitation findings point to. Company tends to add to a task that is already in reach. It does not make an out-of-reach task reachable.
Shared attention moved the explanation away from arousal
The arousal account was not the end of the story. In 2014 Garriy Shteynberg and five colleagues reported five studies in the journal Emotion on what they called group attention, meaning attending to something at the same time as other group members. Scary advertisements felt scarier under group attention, sad images felt sadder and happy images happier. In the fourth and fifth studies, group attention increased the cognitive resources devoted to sad or amusing videos, measured as the share of participants' thoughts that referred to the video. The authors reported that the effects were not explained by differences in physiological arousal, emotional contagion or vicarious experience.
That result matters here because it moves the mechanism away from arousal and toward attention. If knowing that others are attending at the same moment pulls more thought toward the shared content, a person body doubling with a companion could plausibly find their own task holding more of their thinking. The studies tested images and videos, not work.
Attention is also where delay tends to bite. The research on starting and putting off tasks, summarised in Why do we procrastinate, treats the first minutes as the hard part, and a companion who is visibly starting too is a plausible aid at that point.
Where body doubling stands in the research today
A recent public radio report described two forms of body doubling. In the active form the other person takes part in the task, and in the passive form someone is simply nearby, in the room or on a video call. Studies that use the label body doubling for a working session are still few, so the case for it rests on the neighbouring work above. The forms people use differ mainly in what the other person does:
- In the room: the companion works quietly on their own task.
- On a live video call: the companion is on screen, often silent.
- With a spoken check-in: the companion hears the plan and asks about progress.
- With a computer-generated companion: a virtual character fills the role.
The check-in form brings in something different, since being watched is not the same as being accompanied, and the evaluation account of social facilitation puts the pull in expected judgement. The evidence on how watching changes behaviour is taken up in Do Watching Eyes Make People Behave.
The virtual companion has its own study. In 2020 Paweł Strojny and colleagues asked 48 participants to carry out a rescue procedure in virtual reality, with computer-generated agents present, and logged their performance. The main social facilitation effect was not confirmed in that sample. The moderator results supported the prediction that feeling that realistic others are present matters more than the objective facts of who or what is there, and adding social distractors to the environment was not enough to produce the effect. A partner who feels attentive and real may therefore count for more than one who is merely logged on. Feeling accompanied may outweigh simply being logged on.
Common questions
What is body doubling, and why does it help people focus?
Body doubling is working alongside another person who does their own task, in the room or on video. Research on social facilitation shows company can lift effort on tasks a person already knows how to do, though the effect is small.
Is body doubling the same as social facilitation?
They are close relatives. Social facilitation is the research finding that others being present changes performance. Body doubling is a practice that tries to use that change on purpose.
Does it work for every kind of task?
The arousal account says company helps on practised tasks, so body doubling suits those best, and it can hurt on new or hard ones, which makes it a poorer fit for work needing fresh thinking.
Does the other person need to speak or help?
Both active and passive forms are described. Studies of group attention suggest that attending at the same moment matters, and a virtual reality study suggests that felt company matters more than who or what is physically present, but body doubling itself has few direct tests so far.
Sources
Berger, J. Invisible Influence. Seed book; vault hub Books/Invisible Influence.
Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. American Journal of Psychology, 9(4), 507-533. doi:10.2307/1412188 https://doi.org/10.2307/1412188
Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269-274. doi:10.1126/science.149.3681.269 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.149.3681.269
Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94(2), 265-292. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.94.2.265 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.94.2.265
Shteynberg, G., Hirsh, J. B., Apfelbaum, E. P., Larsen, J. T., Galinsky, A. D., & Roese, N. J. (2014). Feeling more together: Group attention intensifies emotion. Emotion, 14(6), 1102-1114. doi:10.1037/a0037697 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037697
Strojny, P., Dużmańska-Misiarczyk, N., Lipp, N., & Strojny, A. (2020). Moderators of social facilitation effect in virtual reality: Co-presence and realism of virtual agents. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1252. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01252 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01252
Texas Public Radio (2024, 25 July). Come study with me: how a virtual buddy might help you get things done. https://www.tpr.org/2024-07-25/come-study-with-me-how-a-virtual-buddy-might-help-you-get-things-done