Choking Under Pressure

Choking under pressure describes a decline in the quality of a person's skilled performance that occurs specifically under conditions of heightened pressure to perform well, such as high-stakes competition, public evaluation, or an important test, even though that same person possesses adequate skill and routinely performs the identical task well under lower-pressure, everyday conditions. Sport and performance psychology researchers have proposed several competing, though not mutually exclusive, explanations for the phenomenon. Explicit monitoring theory holds that pressure causes skilled performers to shift their attention inward toward the fine details of a well-learned movement that functions best when allowed to run automatically, so that this conscious, step-by-step attention actually disrupts fluent execution that would otherwise proceed smoothly outside of awareness. Distraction theories, by contrast, hold that pressure works mainly by consuming limited attentional resources with pressure-related worries, self-doubt, or concern about the consequences of failure, leaving fewer cognitive resources available for the task itself. Researchers studying the phenomenon have generally found that which explanation best fits a given case of choking tends to depend on characteristics of the skill involved, since highly practiced, largely automatic motor skills such as a golf putt appear more vulnerable to the excessive-monitoring pathway, while tasks that place heavier demands on working memory, such as complex mental arithmetic under time pressure, appear more vulnerable to the distraction pathway.