Of course, there are in fact several reasons why Palin can’t perform, prominent ones being her lack of knowledge and her apparently unreflective, incurious nature. But there may be something else at work too, something a bit more psychological. Last year two of my undergraduate students did their Senior Thesis on the subject of “choking.” As they investigated the phenomenon, they came across a concept I had never heard of before: reinvestment. What is reinvestment exactly? It boils down to controlled processing, or what might be better described as overcontrolled processing. When people overthink what they are doing, explicitly review the usually implicit rules of performance as they perform, what results is skill failure due to the disruption of automatic functioning. Moreover, high reinvesters (as measured by a reinvestment scale) are more liable to choke under pressure because, in a word, they think when they ought to be doing.
Anyway, this is what seems to be going on with Palin. What for her used to be automatic—talking to people and expressing her ideas, thoughts, opinions—has become disastrously deautomatized, with the result being the kind of stammering, incoherent, virtually thought-blocked interviews she’s been giving of late, especially the one with Katie Couric. Palin needs to get out of her own way. She needs to stop processing her every sentence. If, on the other hand, she continues to reinvest—and it is a hard thing to stop overnight—Thursday night (the night of the VP debate) is going to be a nightmare. We’ll see soon.
