Over at the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer looks at recent research on the neuroscience of choking. No, not "cough cough" choking but rather failing when the stakes are high and tension is up. To study what happens in the brain when people choke, neuroscientists at Caltech and University College of London watched subjects in a brain scanner play a simple game in which they could win real cash. In short, and to oversimplify what they observed, thinking too much screws you up. From the New Yorker:
Instead of being excited by their future riches, the subjects were fretting over their possible failure. What's more, the scientists demonstrated that the most loss-averse individuals showed the biggest drop-off in performance when the stakes were raised. In other words, the fear of failure was making them more likely to fail. They kept on losing because they hated losses.
Such results should probably make us rethink the role of incentives in the workplace. Although we assume that there's a simple, linear relationship between financial rewards and productivity—that's why Wall Street gives its best employees huge bonuses—such rewards can backfire, especially when the task is difficult, or requires expertise.
"The New Neuroscience of Choking" (via Dave Pell's NextDraft)
