Choking, or failing in a pressure-filled situation, is common enough. But the underlying psychology is surprisingly mysterious for such a familiar phenomenon. So scientists at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology decided to investigate what happens in the brain of a person who chokes. They recruited 26 men and women to practice playing a mentally taxing video game — which involved moving dots on a screen quickly — while lying down in an M.R.I. machine.
The researchers gave each participant $100 in real money, which they might add to or lose during play; before each game, the researchers would name a figure from $0 to $100 as the possible “stakes.” But to increase the pressure to perform as well as possible on every game, they told participants that just one randomly chosen game from the hundreds played during the session would determine how much money was won or lost. The M.R.I. recorded brain activity, especially in the ventral striatum, a portion of the brain known to be involved in physical performance. Afterward, to determine their “loss aversion,” the intensity with which they react to the prospect of gains and losses, the subjects gambled on virtual coin tosses.
The results were unexpected. When presented with potential gains, highly loss-averse participants showed intensifying activity in their ventral striatums, and their game play improved. But when they had an opportunity to win $100, their performance declined precipitously. They choked. Their counterparts with low loss aversion — who ought to have been unfazed by the prospect of losing their money — did better in all of their games, except when they were faced with losing $100. Then they choked, consistently.
People supposed to be strongly hostile to losing choked only when they might win; people supposed to be unfazed by losses fell apart only when faced with losing.
“The findings are counterintuitive, I know,” says Vikram S. Chib, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins who led the study, which was published recently in The Journal of Neuroscience. But the results indicate that how someone frames a high-pressure situation, and whether winning or losing is emphasized, affect performance.
It may be that those of us who don’t like losses also have an exaggerated fear of failure, so we regard that opportunity to win $100 not as a chance for gain but as an outsize opportunity to fail. Conversely, people more comfortable with loss might harbor a surprising intolerance for losing what they already have. But such explanations are speculative for now, Dr. Chib says. He and his colleagues hope that experiments already underway will produce more and clearer explanations.
For now, the practical takeaway seems to be that you should figure out your tolerance for loss and frame high-pressure situations accordingly. You are likely to find it easier to avoid choking if you take into account your complicated relationship to winning.
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