Researchers Determine What Makes People 'Choke'
Dec. 20 -- We've seen it happen to the best of them.
A world-class athlete is going for the gold when a well-honed skill suddenly deserts him. A concert pianist, finally getting that chance to play in Carnegie Hall, finds her fingers have turned to thumbs. Tiger misses a six-inch putt.
The big moment comes, and goes, and they've blown it.
In a word, they've choked. Even those of us who have never reached the top know the feeling. We should have been able to do something that was easily within our reach, and we couldn't pull it off. Why did our skills fail us when we needed them the most?
Researchers at Michigan State University think they have figured out why. A series of experiments there indicate that we choke because we are trying too hard, not because we aren't trying hard enough.
Science by Golf
"Paying too much attention to the performance breaks down the skill," says Sian L. Beilock, who headed up the research project as part of her doctoral dissertation in psychology. "And that's what causes choking."
Beilock reported her findings in the December issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, published by the American Psychological Association. Beilock and her faculty adviser, Thomas H. Carr, brought 54 male and female students into their lab and taught them how to play golf. Or at least how to putt.
Tests were designed to see if the researchers could induce choking, which they found they could do fairly easily, and whether people could be "vaccinated" against choking by exposing them to such things as distractions. If they could, the researchers reasoned, they could figure out what provides the best "inoculation," and that would tell them what causes choking.
"There are two theories on why people choke under pressure," Beilock says. "One theory suggests that under pressure, you become distracted by the pressure, or the audience, or the consequences of failure. In essence, you don't pay enough attention to your skill.
"Another theory predicts just the opposite. You get in a high-pressure situation and you start paying too much attention to your skill. You start trying to control it in a way that you never did in practice.
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