Ulterior Motives

How goals, both seen and unseen, drive behavior

Art Markman is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think. See full bio

June 18, 2008, Sport and Competition

Grace Under Fire

What causes athletes to choke and excel under pressure?

In the past few days, we have seen two phenomenal sports performances. First, Tiger Woods, limping along after surgery survives 5 days of golf to outlast and outplay the game’s best players. He drains a series of impossible putts to keep himself in contention and wins the US Open. Then, a few nights later, the Boston Celtics complete an improbable turnaround from a year ago, making them the NBA Champions. The pressure on these athletes is enormous. And for every brilliant performance on the largest stages that sports has to offer, there are stories of players and teams that choked under pressure, folding under the gaze of the crowd.

This blog is devoted to discussions of motivation, and the factors that cause people to choke and excel under pressure are intimately tied up with motivation. I’ll devote a number of entries to this topic, but here I just want to get out some of the basic theories of why people choke and excel under pressure to give us a grounding for future discussions.

First of all, performance pressure usually occurs under conditions when there is a high social, economic and/or physical cost to failure. These conditions affect two aspects of people’s motivation. First, the high cost of failure creates a lot of psychological arousal. Second, people’s concern for potential failure will engage the avoidance motivational system.

[Because this blog is new, a quick word on approach and avoidance motivation. Desired states that people want to bring about create approach goals. So winning a big prize is an approach goal often associated with big sporting events. Undesired states of the world that people want to avoid create avoidance goals. Losing is an undesirable thing, and so people may create a goal to avoid losing.]

There are two big theories out there about the effects of this high arousal and avoidance motivation on performance: distraction and monitoring. Though we tend to like to find one explanation for things, both of these theories are probably right under different circumstances. The distraction theory says that performance pressure reduces the mental resources that people have available. There is a nice paper on test anxiety by Wine in Psychological Bulletin back in 1971 that presents this theory. These mental resources are important for operating in complex environments, and can lead to bad performance under pressure. In the finals of the 1993 NCAA basketball tournament for example, Michigan sophomore Chris Webber tried to call a timeout when his team was out of timeouts. This lack of game awareness was probably helped along by the high pressure of a close game.

NBA Finals The monitoring theory says that performance pressure causes people to begin to pay attention to their own performance. Roy Baumeister and colleagues developed this theory in the 1980s. This monitoring is a problem for athletes, because it often hurts performance of a motor skill (like swinging a golf club or shooting a free-throw). For example, swinging a golf club is something that the golfer should do automatically. If the golfer starts thinking about the mechanics of the swing, that is probably going to cause problems. There is a lot of nice ongoing research that aims to understand when the predictions of distraction and monitoring seem to be operating. Some of the players in these studies include Roy Baumeister, Sian Beilock, Tom Carr, and Rob Gray. In addition, some work in my lab with Todd Maddox and Darrell Worthy has been examining the effect of performance pressure on learning and performance.

So, how can these theories explain how athletes like Tiger Woods consistently perform well? Rob Gray discusses the importance of what an athlete monitors in pressure situations. Athletes must learn not to focus their attention on the mechanics of their movements in pressure situations. When athletes practice their mechanics, they must learn to focus attention on outcomes and on game situations rather than on movement and performance. This facet is one tiny piece of the puzzle that leads to grace under pressure. I’ll have more to say about this in later entries.