PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE
The initial chip leader at the final table of the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event was Darvin Moon, self-employed logger from Oakland, Maryland. Moon had won his entry ticket to the event on his third try at a $130-buy-in satellite tournament in Wheeling, West Virginia. The trip to Vegas for the WSOP was his first flight in a commercial airplane.
Sitting across from Moon was Steve Begleiter, a senior executive at the investment bank Bear Stearns, but a relative guppy at the WSOP final table, with 25 million chips to Moon’s 58.6 million. Moon was dealt king, queen off-suit and made a reasonable raise to 1.3 million chips. Begleiter raised to 3.9 million and with everyone else folding, Moon, already invested in the pot, called. Then with a 2, 3, and 4 on the flop, Darvin Moon was left looking at a whole lot of nothing. He checked. Begleiter bet 5.35 million. With nothing but king-high, Moon eyed his cards and raised to 15 million—what the ESPN analyst described as “going fishing without a license.” Begleiter licked his lips, swallowed, and pushed his chips—all in.
Now, being caught fishing without a license is one thing, but at that point Darvin Moon already had his line in the water to the tune of 15 million chips. It would’ve taken him only 6 million more chips to call for a chance not only at a pot worth 44.75 million chips but a chance to eliminate one of seven remaining players at the table. It’s a call everyone at the final table makes with their eyes closed—that is, perhaps, with $6 and not $6 million on the line.
Darvin Moon folded. Analysts called it the worst fold in the history of tournament poker. Not only did Moon fold in the literal poker meaning of the word, but he folded in the sense of the collapse of his brain under pressure. Though Moon would go on to eliminate Begleiter, he’d lost the chip lead and ended up losing the tournament to twenty-one-year-old wunderkind Joe Cada.
By looking inside Darvin Moon’s brain as it crumpled like a Coke can, you can learn to avoid similar mistakes.
First, while pressure seems like an esoteric, intangible thing, that’s not the case in the brain. Instead it sits like a lead weight in your working memory, claiming space that could otherwise hold useful information. And because working memory is a mainline to general intelligence, space claimed by pressure makes you measurably dumber—you literally have less IQ in the face of a $6 million bet than you do in the face of a $6 one.
Interestingly, this leads to a nasty catch-22 for minorities—a recent study by University of Chicago researcher Sian Beilock, author of the book Choke, showed that a common worry of people from ethnic minorities when taking tests is that they might do poorly, and so confirm the negative stereotype of their minority—a worry that test-takers from the majority ethnicity don’t share. According to Beilock, this unequal worry, called stereotype threat, claims space in working memory, making minorities score lower on the test and, cruelly, ensuring minorities confirm precisely the negative stereotype they’d been so worried about.
Add to reduced working-memory capacity what Beilock calls analysis paralysis: pressure flips a mental switch from implicit to explicit thought, making you apply a layer of analysis to things that should be automatic. It’s as if when your mind recognizes a serious situation, it turns off the autopilot in favor of manual steering—only, it does so even in cases in which you’ve trained autopilot to be the better driver. It’s very Zen: you can’t think your way to performance under pressure, and the harder you try, the more likely you are to fail.
Your brain, cruelly forced by pressure to rely on analysis that’s momentarily absent, responds by desperately trying to latch onto anything it considers an immediate win. On the scale of risk-versus-reward on which we base many of our decisions, pressure thumbs the scale on the side of perceived reward, making you prioritize risky choices with immediate payouts. For example, researchers Mara Mather and Nichole Lighthall showed that when subjects stuck their hands in ice water, the stress primed their brains’ dopamine pumps to release more happy juice—meaning that under stressful conditions, a small reward creates the pleasure of a much larger reward. Likewise, chronic pressure can make you chronically prioritize the quick rewards of drugs and alcohol while discounting their long-term risk.
You can see this in a 1980 documentary film by researchers J. Zucker, D. Zucker, J. Abrahams, K. Abdul-Jabbar, et al, published under the title Airplane! In this groundbreaking work, a participant who happens to be the supervisor of an air traffic control tower remarks (due to increasingly nonoptimal control of an inbound plane), “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking!” As airplane control further deteriorates and pressure on the control tower increases, the participant escalates, remarking, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking!” Later he admits, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!” and finally, as a crash starts to seem inevitable, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines!”
In any case, the more you’re forced to wrestle your risk/reward balance back to level, the harder it gets to keep doing so. For example, in February 2012, the New York Times told the story of a sixteen-year-old named Felix who was arrested for the murder of Antonio Ramirez in Oakland, California. In the proverbial white room with a bare, swinging lightbulb, police pressed for a confession that Felix didn’t want to give. When Felix finally started “cooperating,” the police interrogators fed him details that helped him “remember” elements of the crime scene. Finally, late that night, the police taped Felix’s confession. Three days later, when Felix was handed the charge sheet in court, he realized something kind of important: at the time of the murder, he’d been locked up in a juvenile detention facility for violating parole in an unrelated case. Under pressure, Felix’s need for the immediate reward of relief outweighed the long-term consequences of confession.
So beware. Stress plugs your working memory, analysis paralysis forces you to try to use it anyway, and your dopamine circuits cry for a quick, risky solution. This nasty trio can lead to Darvin-Moon–like folding your way out of danger when it would’ve been wiser in the long term to call.
Now you’re aware of the human tendency to punt under pressure, and this awareness alone can help bring you back to baseline decision-making under stress. Then, depending on the specific flavor of pressure, pick one of two opposite strategies to help you excel. Both strategies fight the plague of analysis paralysis, but from different directions. The difference, as hinted at above, is whether you’ve automated the best response. If you’re facing a new stressful situation—one for which you don’t have a strong, reliable instinctual response—your goal is to get past the burdens stress places on your working memory and apply meaningful analysis to the problem. If it’s a familiar situation, your goal is to force your brain out of analysis so that your trained intuitions can stay in the mental driver’s seat.
If you’re facing a new form of pressure, a quartet of Greek researchers, including the colorfully named Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis, found that self-talk can help direct the needed analysis. This isn’t the “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” of Stuart Smalley as played on Saturday Night Live by the (now) Democratic senator from Minnesota. Instead, it’s instructional self-talk. Perhaps if you were defusing a bomb, it would be something along the lines of “First I cut the red wire, and then I gently slide out the detonation pin, and then …” This instructional self-talk can divide a new, stressful task into seemingly more manageable components and focus your attention on each one in turn.
Then there are tasks you’ve automated, in which your goal should be to turn off that destructive layer of analysis that kicks in under pressure. Here, you’ll want to apply a specific technique for silencing thought—turning what researcher Joan Vickers calls a quiet eye on the problem. In every sport she’s studied, Vickers has identified crucial milliseconds that make or break the success of, for example, a free throw or putt or rifle shot or dart throw. And for each sport, there’s a crucial point in space—the front of a basketball rim or the back of a golf ball. And across all sports, spending these milliseconds focused on the crucial point in space leads to success—swish, drain, bang, or bull’s-eye.
By applying the quiet eye technique to her employer’s women’s basketball team at the University of Calgary, Vickers helped the Lady Dinos improve their free-throw shooting by 22 percent over two seasons and jump from a dismal seventeenth in their league to an astounding second in Canada. A similar study at Florida State of quiet eye in pool players found that focus on the cue ball and target ball without a lot of switching between the two was a major distinction between novice and expert players.
So the technique for executing a task you’ve done a thousand times before is this: ready, imagine, focus, execute, and evaluate. When you execute, do it quickly and smoothly, intentionally turning off the layer of analysis that creates paralysis.
Here’s how it looks:
On June 4, 2012, playing the par-3 sixteenth hole at the PGA Memorial Golf Tournament in Dublin, Ohio, Tiger Woods hit his tee shot over the green and into an impossible lie in the rough, fifty feet away from the hole. As everyone in the civilized world knows, it had been a rough couple of years for Tiger, in which his personal life fell down a hole that suddenly his golf balls refused. Now, staring at a lightning-fast green sloping to water behind the hole, Woods could only lay up and hope to sink a tough par putt that would keep him a shot behind leader Rory Sabbatini.
Tiger stepped up to his demon lie, pulled a 60-degree wedge from his bag, and took a tentative-looking practice swing. ESPN said, “If he puts it short he’s dead, if he puts it long he’s dead.”
In the forum for the Yahoo! News article describing Tiger’s shot, a user named Thomas wrote, “I hit that shot with a 60° wedge last week and birdied hole 12 at a course here in Trumbull County. You can’t beat that club for getting out of high grass.” To which another user, Tom R, replied, “With all due respect, no, you didn’t hit the same shot. No money on the line, no huge gallery following you, no pressure from 3 years of paying for your incredibly bad choices.”
Like Darvin Moon at the WSOP final table, Tiger battled a working memory plugged with pressure, his brain screaming about the immediate reward of landing in the safe, close rough at the edge of the green.
Instead, he hit what Jack Nicklaus, whose record for career PGA wins Tiger hoped to tie at the tournament, called “the most unbelievable, gutsy shot I’ve ever seen.” After his tentative practice swing, you can almost see Tiger tunneling through his mind, trying to find his intuition, doing an end run past working memory and its analytical failings. From fifty feet out, he landed his chip on the edge of the green, and on the ball’s final revolution, it disappeared into the hole, turning the momentum of the tournament and perhaps his career. The difference between a hairless housecat and Tiger was all in his brain.
INTRINSIC VS. EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION
A 1997 summary of twenty-four studies shows that especially under pressure, people perform better when intrinsically motivated by the desire to master a task than when extrinsically motivated by rewards for peak performance. Many of these studies show that creating this difference is as easy as giving instructions that frame a task as an enjoyable challenge rather than a test. And the results hold true for pressure-filled tasks ranging from collage-making to creative writing to shooting basketball free throws to math to psychology tests to puzzles. So for a quick performance boost in pressure-filled situations, take a second to focus on the skill rather than the result. Work to improve and not necessarily to win and you’ll win more often as a by-product.
Click here for answers.
COGNITIVE INTERVIEW
An extreme example of performance under pressure is the attempt of an eyewitness to recall the specifics of a violent event. A host of studies show that eyewitnesses tend to improve their memory of the violent event itself while losing memories of details surrounding the violence—a kind of tunnel vision so extreme that witnesses may lose important memories of faces and facts. Then there’s been a ton of studies exploring how police interrogators can retrieve this lost information. You can use these strategies to retrieve your memories of stressful situations. And because remembering is a central component of learning, ensuring the accurate memory of, say, a heated boardroom argument, a fight with a significant other or child, or a high-stakes poker hand can help you learn to perform better the next time the situation arises. In fact, accurate memory of any stressful situation leads to better decisions and actions next time.
Think back to a stressful situation. Then remember its details by applying the following four basic pieces of a cognitive interview, as described in a 1996 paper in the American Journal of Psychology by UCLA psychologist Edward Geiselman:
1. Reinstate the context: Try to reinstate in your mind the context surrounding the incident. Think about what the surrounding environment looked like at the scene, such as rooms, the weather, and any nearby people or objects. Also think about how you were feeling at the time and think about your reactions to the incident.
2. Report everything: Some people hold back information because they are not quite sure that the information is important. Don’t edit anything out of your report, even things you think may not be important.
3. Recall the events in different order: It’s natural to go through the incident from beginning to end. However, you also should try to go through the events in reverse order. Or try starting with the thing that impressed you the most in the incident and then go from there, remembering both forward in time and backward.
4. Change perspectives: Try to recall the incident from different perspectives that you may have had, or adopt the perspectives of others who were present during the incident. For example, try to place yourself in the role of a prominent character in the incident and think about what he or she must have seen.
Click here for answers.
COMBATTING EXPERT CHOKING
University of Chicago’s Sian Beilock shows that expert golfers don’t remember the minutiae of their putting strokes—they’ve trained putting to automaticity and so no longer store the specifics of their actions. Beilock calls this “expert-induced amnesia.” She also shows this is an important reason why experts choke. See, pressure forces expert golfers to analyze their putting stroke, but when they look in their consciousness for these procedural specifics—Oh God!—the specifics are nowhere to be found. Instead, there’s a very disturbing nothing.
Beilock also shows how to combat this tendency to choke under unavoidable and disturbing self-scrutiny: experts should store techniques not only in automaticity but in consciousness as well. She created this effect by videotaping putters during training, supposedly so that experts could later scrutinize their technique. Of course, knowing they’d be studied tricked golfers into analyzing their own technique during training, and they stored this analysis in consciousness. Now not only could they putt, but they knew how they putted—and Beilock showed they had effectively vaccinated themselves against choking. Whenever pressure forced analysis, they now had analysis in spades.
You can do the same thing. Think of something you’ve automated, be it cooking breakfast, driving, typing a fairly standardized e-mail, or shooting a free throw. Next time you’re doing it, keep a running commentary of how you’re doing what you’re doing. Codify this procedure. Making your expert, unconscious behaviors conscious will allow you to find these behaviors in your brain when you need them most.
Click here for answers.
COMBATTING NOVICE CHOKING
Of course, experts aren’t the only ones who choke. Novices choke too, but for very different reasons. Again, novices haven’t made their behaviors automatic and so instead depend on working memory to guide them through tasks (oh, and some tasks—especially cognitive rather than motor tasks—you simply can’t automate). These novices can’t feel their way through and instead have to think their way through. And as we’ve seen, pressure claims space in working memory—it’s as if under pressure, novices have to do two things at once: deal with pressure and deal with the task. And that’s not just a metaphor: Sian Beilock showed that training novices under what’s called a dual-task condition leads to better performance later, when pressure plays the role of a second task. Beilock did this by forcing subjects to monitor a string of words for a target word while learning to putt. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding an equally distracting task. Whatever it is, combine the distraction with your training so that later, when pressure provides a distraction, your brain is already used to doing two things at once.
Click here for answers.
PRACTICE LIKE YOU PLAY (SO YOU CAN PLAY LIKE YOU PRACTICE)
To create pressure, Beilock told her putters that if they could improve their performance by 20 percent over a final, pressure-filled eighteen putts they’d earn $5. The result: practicing under pressure led to better performance under pressure. So when practicing your own skill, it’s useful to ratchet up the stakes. No one is likely to bet $5 on your practice, but here’s how to create a similar kind of pressure: Pick the most egregious political cause you can think of. Search online for a way to donate to this cause and impose a $5 donation as a penalty for poor performance—consider penalizing yourself for lack of improvement. Now when you practice, there’s something at stake—and when you perform, you’ll be used to this pressure.
Click here for answers.