Profile: Sian Beilock
UNDERSTANDING CHOKING
One universal phenomenon common to athletes is choking under pressure. A professional golfer, for example, who has made thousands of five-foot putts, suddenly misses one when the U.S. Open championship is on the line. Why does this happen? Ask Sian Beilock, M.A. ’01, Ph.D. ’03, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, who has established herself as what the Chronicle of Higher Education calls “the go-to psychologist for this universal quirk.”
Beilock and her MSU advisor T.C. Carr have co-authored several articles about “choking” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. If you Google “choking under pressure,” the first hit leads to one of them. “I’ve always been interested in how high-pressure or high-stakes situations can alter how one things about and attends to their skill, and in turn, results in less-than-optimal performance,” explains Sian, a native of Piedmont in the San Francisco Bay Area.
After graduation from the University of California, San Diego, where she played lacrosse, Sian came to MSU—trading the “beaches of Southern California for Midwestern winters”—to study kinesiology with Deborah Feltz and psychology with Thomas Carr. By combining these two disciplines, what Beilock discovered is that choking can result from various causes, depending on the attentional demands of the skill being performed.
“A really good putter may execute a five-foot putt relatively automatically—that is, they don’t need to attend to every step of performance,” she explains. “Pressure seems to cause such golfers to pay more attention to their skill in a manner that actually disrupts execution. They might think, ‘I have to move my hand this way, or keep my stroke smooth.’ Counter intuitively, these types of thoughts may actually disrupt their performance.”
By contrast, if someone is performing a difficult math problem on the SAT, which, unlike putting, requires that one attend to and hold in memory multiple pieces of information at one time, a different phenomenon occurs. “Solving a difficult math problem requires significant attentional resources,” she explains. “But when one worries about the result, it may draw such resources away from the task at hand, resulting in poor performance.”
So to sum up, Sian’s advice to golfers and test takers alike would be “practice, practice, practice.” Moreover, for golfers in the heat of battle, “Just do it. Don’t think so much.” However, when taking a test, “Thinking about the problem at hand rather than the what-ifs of screwing up is important.”
