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Is monitoring one’s actions causally relevant to choking under pressure?

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Notes

  1. After graduating from high school at age 15 and before entering college, I spent a number of years working as a professional ballet dancer with North Carolina Dance Theatre (now Charlotte Ballet), among other companies.

  2. A choke, as I understand it is performing not necessarily far, far worse than ever before (I’m a pushover for manipulated literary allusions, whether perfectly accurate or not) but far, far worse than would be expected. Now, do cases that we refer to as chokes actually require explanation or are they merely cases of poor performance that would be predicted statically? Psychologists who aim to explain choking in terms of increased attention to movement assume that it is a phenomenon that requires explanation; I shall do the same.

  3. However, see Toner, Moran and Montero (forthcoming).

  4. I would like to thank Lorenzo Ruffo, an undergraduate student at the College of Staten Island, for drawing my attention to this issue.

  5. Also, high anxiety induces various physiological changes that appear to hinder performance. The fight-or-flight response which anxiety produces shunts blood flow to the larger muscles, leaving cold feet and hands, and thus motor skills relying on the hands or feet may be harmed. It can cause loss of peripheral vision, increased perspiration, and tremors. These points may be obvious, but they are often not mentioned in the literature on choking. The choke is thought to be something different in kind. But is it?

  6. See also Ravn and Christensen (2013).

  7. Might their performance be affected by the fact that they knew that after playing, they would need to record what was going on in their minds? It certainly might, however, although this might be relevant to the question of how much athletes think during games which they are not asked to do this, I don’t think it is relevant to the question of whether thinking interferes with performing. Even if the athletes end up thinking more than they normally would, it would seem that their reports of the effectiveness of their thoughts would not be significantly affected.

  8. This is not to say that simply thinking about stereotypes helps avoid the detrimental effects of stereotyped discourse, for as indicated by Beilock (2011, pp. 165–166, and 201), in reference primarily to a study on racial stereotype threat, (Steele and Aronson 1995), it seems that merely mentioning a stereotype can hinder performance on standardized tests (because, she hypothesizes, the subjects will have this stereotype in mind while taking the tests.) However, I take it that the situation I am describing is relevantly different primarily because the person who might make stereotypical remarks about girls and boys is not the one who is overtly negatively affected by the remarks; rather, it is the little girls who are always complimented on their looks are (or at least is seems reasonable to think that at least in our culture this could have a negative effect.) Another difference is that what I think is useful to keep in mind is not just the stereotype, or not even just the idea that there such a view is mistaken, but the idea that making remarks in accord with the stereotype should be avoided, the idea that you should not complement a girl’s looks. (It might be interesting to test how girl’s performance on standardized tests is affected by priming the idea that although there is a stereotype that they do worse than boy’s, there is no truth to it and that in taking the test they should overcome this and prove that they are just as (if not more) capable than boys.) Still another differences is that presumably making a casual remark to a girl takes far fewer cognitive resources than taking a standardized test and so diverting cognitive resources to the thought that one needs to say this rather than that would presumably not have a negative effect on one’s ability to make such claims whereas diverting cognitive resources even to thoughts about avoiding stereotypes might have a detrimental effect on the highly demanding task of taking a test. For other ways in which focusing more and thinking about one’s ordinary actions as one is performing them can improve those actions, see

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  1. Program in Philosophy, City University of New York, The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY, 11016, USA

    Barbara Gail Montero

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  1. Barbara Gail Montero
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Correspondence to Barbara Gail Montero.

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Montero, B.G. Is monitoring one’s actions causally relevant to choking under pressure?. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 379–395 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9400-0

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