341. Why We Choke Under Pressure (and How Not To)

It happens to just about everyone, whether you’re going for Olympic gold or giving a wedding toast. We hear from psychologists, economists, and the golfer who some say committed the greatest choke of all time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio, sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. The best investments are the ones you make in yourself, and no one knows that better than Southern New Hampshire University. With more than 200 online degree programs, no set class times, and low online tuition, Southern New Hampshire University is built to fit your life today and set you up for success tomorrow. Education is an investment. Why not make it a smart one? Apply for free at SNHU.edu/freakonomics. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must haves, like gym access or breakfast,

• 0:45Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you're a big golf fan, and statistically speaking, you're almost certainly not, but if you are, you know this is the week of the Open Championship, or what Americans call the British Open. It is the oldest and arguably most important major tournament in golf. This year, it's being held at the Scottish course Carnoustie, which is so difficult, it's often called Carnasty. Carnoustie also hosted the Open back in 1999.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  The golf course was so hard that it inevitably was going to give us some bizarre conclusion.

• 2:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Brandel Chambley. He played on the PGA Tour for 15 years. Now, he's an analyst for the Golf Channel.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  There was going to be a train wreck at some point.

• 2:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And yet, on the tournament's final day, on the final hole, stood a man who had tamed this savage course.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  The golfing gods are with the young man at this moment, and it'll be interesting to see what he does now.

• 3:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  This man, with one hole to play, held a three-stroke lead. So obvious was his impending victory that his name had already been engraved on the Open's iconic trophy, the claret jug. It read, Jean Van de Veldt.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  He was a very handsome, debonair Frenchman, you know? And he had a gorgeous golf swing.

• 3:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Van de Veldt was ranked just 152nd in the world.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  He was not a good driver of the ball. He didn't drive it long, and he drove it crooked. Although that week, for whatever reason, he found another gear that week, he did drive it long.

• 3:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  History wasn't necessarily in Van de Veldt's favor.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  He would have been the first Frenchman in over 100 years to have won the Open Championship. And there was a sense that Frenchmen don't win majors. Frenchmen paint beautiful paintings, and they write epic books about democracy and revenge. They don't win the Open Championship.

• 4:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  But standing on the final tee with a three-stroke lead, if you're a professional golfer, you will not lose that tournament. How ludicrous would that be? Imagine a professional chef. She's about to make an omelet. She goes to crack an egg on the side of the bowl, but instead, she somehow misses the bowl entirely and smashes the egg all over her face. That's how ludicrous it would be to lose a golf tournament, standing on the last tee with a three-shot lead. It would require a grotesque combination of decisions and actions.

• 4:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's a word for this. It is such a horrific word that some people don't even like to say it aloud. We're not one of those people.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's lots of different ways people can choke.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  The choke is an amazing thing because it really does destroy our careers.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  And it doesn't have to be, you know, the Olympic Games. It can be when you're parallel parking and people around you are watching, right?

• 5:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, when we choke, why we choke, and maybe, just maybe, how not to.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Oh, dear. This is really, this is, uh, this is so, so, so, so sad.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  If we're going to talk about choking, we probably need to bring in some psychologists.

• 5:45Speaker 06

  I'm Anders Ericsson, and I'm a professor of psychology at Florida State University here in Tallahassee, Florida.

• 5:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anders Ericsson, pioneer of the deliberate practice movement and the 10,000-hours idea, has been studying expert performers for years.

• 6:00Speaker 06

  Ballet dancers, gymnasts, and all sorts of athletes. We've looked at chess experts, surgeons, doctors, teachers, musicians, taxi drivers, recreational activities like golf, and even there's some research on scientists.

• 6:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Define choking for me as you see it.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  Well, choking to me is actually somebody who cramps up and in some ways becomes unable to, you know, really act appropriately in a situation or acts in a very decreased performance.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  I've defined choking as worse performance than you'd expect from an individual, given that there is high pressure or stakes associated with the situation.

• 6:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's Cian Bylock.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  I'm a cognitive scientist, and I am president of Barnard College at Columbia University.

• 6:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Before coming to Barnard, Bylock ran the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago. She also wrote a book called Choke.

• 7:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I'm curious to know if you can sort of rank the different domains that people engage in regularly and where we're most likely to choke.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  I really think that any situation where there's expectations for success can cause choking. And it doesn't have to be, you know, the Olympic Games. It can be when you're parallel parking and people around you are watching, right? Or if you're in an elevator and you're trying to figure out whether you're going to say something to the person next to you. You know, we talk about these epic moments of choking, but it's a desire to perform at our best and situations in which we're evaluated happen constantly.

• 7:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me a little bit on the characteristics of those who are more and less prone to choke. What about high IQ versus low IQ?

• 7:54Speaker 03

  In my research and in others, we've shown, perhaps counterintuitively, that individuals who have the most ability to focus, the most working memory, the most fluid intelligence are actually more prone to perform poorly under stress. And the idea is that if you normally devote lots of cognitive resources to what you're doing and being in a pressure-filled situation robs you of those resources, you can't perform as well.

• 8:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've just described all the reasons why I'm not very good at playing golf under pressure. And what about, say, gender? Male versus female, more or less likely to choke?

• 8:36Speaker 03

  I think it's really dependent on the situation. So we know that when women are aware of stereotypes that they shouldn't perform well, maybe they're aware of stereotypes that men are better at math, even though I think these stereotypes are quite unfounded. Just being aware of that can affect how they perform. And it can be because you're anxious about math and so you can't calculate the tip on the dinner bill as your smart friends look on. Or it could be because you're a girl in a room full of men trying to think and compute math problems and you're aware that...

• 9:14Speaker 03

  There's ideas out there that you shouldn't be as good at what you're doing.

• 9:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then let me just ask you one more kind of summary about surroundings. So I know that you're right. So I kind of loved this, but also felt a little creeped out. No offense that your parents would often travel great distances to see you present like at an academic seminar. And by great distances, we're talking Australia. Your dad flew to Australia to see you give a talk at a seminar. Is that true?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  And it's still true in my current role. My mother shows up at lots of events and I've actually instructed my assistant to not give out my calendar without permission to her. It's very supportive, but also stress inducing.

• 10:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So on that note, talk about choking in a what you might call a friendly environment versus a hostile environment.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  There's research showing that when you have friendly faces in front of you, people who are supportive, although that could feel nice, it actually creates pressure-filled situations. You often start thinking of yourself as they might. And so when my mother is in the room, I sometimes think of myself as a young girl. And you also are quite self-conscious.

• 10:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  In a recent episode about the World Cup, we looked at the research into why there's such a strong home field advantage in most sports. The most plausible explanation is that referees are subconsciously influenced by the home crowd and may make one or two key calls in the home team's favor. The research also showed that on balance, athletes themselves do not perform better in front of a home crowd. And in fact, when Seon Byalok tells us that friendly faces may actually create pressure-filled situations, you have to wonder if on some dimensions, they might perform even worse.

• 11:10Speaker 07

  My main research interests are behavioral economics, contest theory, and sports economics.

• 11:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Alex Kruemer. He's an economist at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He recently co-authored a paper called Choking Under Pressure in Front of a Supportive Audience: Evidence from Professional Biathlon. That is the sport combining cross-country skiing with precision rifle shooting.

• 11:33Speaker 08

  Who's shooting quickly up there? Lissa! Wow, gone through quickly, and goal!

• 11:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kruemer analyzed the performance of more than 400 biathletes, male and female, over 15 years of competition, including world championships and the Olympics. How did they do at home versus abroad? Let's look first at the skiing portion.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  So we find that home biathletes, they ski faster at home, about 2 seconds faster.

• 11:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so maybe all those home cheers do spur the athletes to ski faster. How about the shooting?

• 12:03Speaker 07

  Both men and women miss more shots when competing in their home country compared to competing abroad.

• 12:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Men missed, on average, 0.15 more shots at home than abroad. Women, a bit more, 0.2 shots.

• 12:18Speaker 07

  One may say that this is not too much, but it's quite a large effect if we take into account that the average time it takes to ski a penalty loop is about 25 seconds.

• 12:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. For every missed shot, you have to ski a small penalty loop.

• 12:34Speaker 07

  So this means that when competing at home, a biathlete loses, on average, 4 to 6 seconds. And to put this number into perspective, in the Olympic Games in Sochi, the home biathlete Anton Shippulin, which, by the way, I really love his performance, he was only 0.7 seconds away from a bronze medal after missing one shot.

• 12:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what if skiing faster is what causes you to miss more shots?

• 13:01Speaker 07

  So one may assume that since they ski faster, they have higher heart rate, and therefore they miss more. But the evidence on the association between heart rate and shooting performance is mixed.

• 13:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so that doesn't seem to explain the worst shooting at home. Is there maybe another explanation?

• 13:23Speaker 07

  The second explanation is that usually they perform the shooting task in a very automatic manner. They don't look around, they don't care about anything. But probably when you perform at home, something disturbing you.

• 13:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Krummer tells us that biathletes usually perform the shooting in a very automatic manner. That sounds like it might be relevant to our choking discussion. So what exactly does that mean? Back to the psychologist, Sian Bylock.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  We know that sometimes people don't perform up to their potential precisely when they want to the most. And sometimes that happens because people pay too much attention to the details of what they're doing, details that should be left on autopilot.

• 14:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  At the Human Performance Lab, Bylock and her colleagues did an experiment with expert golfers and novices.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  So we set up a putting green in our lab, and when we tried to ask experts for their memories of how they'd taken a putt, they couldn't tell us so much about it. The novices, the people who are just learning, could tell us way more. And we thought, wow, this might be an indication that these high-level golfers aren't paying so much attention to what they're doing. And so one of the reasons that they might perform poorly under stress is when they start paying attention.

• 14:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  The way you've just put that would not be that surprising to anyone who follows, let's say, golf per se, right?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  It is true that, you know, sometimes athletes have these moments of feelings of being in the zone. But I think, you know, we often don't think about this idea that paying too much attention could actually be counterproductive. Like, you hear coaches yelling, "Concentrate," all the time. And so being able to actually show that when you're at this high level, you're not paying attention to the details, and one of the reasons you mess up is because you start paying attention to those details, allowed us to start asking questions about how we prevent you from paying attention to the details.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  What is it that people actually are thinking about when they're doing putting?

• 15:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anders Ericsson also did putting experiments in his lab at Florida State with somewhat different results.

• 15:34Speaker 06

  So we actually asked our participants to think out loud and recruited skilled and less skilled individuals. And what we found was that the skilled individuals, they were actually verbalizing more about thoughts and basically factors that they were taking into account in order to actually decide how they were going to putt the putt. So the argument is that... If you're really skilled, you're actually generating our rich description here of the situation. So you're trying to take into account here how basically the ball would roll and where you need to aim in order to have the appropriate ball path.

• 16:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I know that some psychologists argue that what separates the better performers, the top-tier performers from the rest of us, is, you know, some form of automaticity, right? That you're going into some free-flowing state that's dependent on all your talent and experience, et cetera, but you're not actually engaging in it cognitively. You're saying that's not what you've found.

• 16:34Speaker 06

  What we're finding is that experts are able to make adjustments, you know, when they're performing. So if you're a musician and the acoustics in a given performance environment is different, you can actually make adjustments in the same way that a soccer player, you know, when the situation changes, they can actually make adjustments appropriate to that situation. And I think that's kind of what we're finding here is that the really elite people, those who are really able to keep improving, are the ones who actually have a very refined description of the situation and are increasing their control over what they're doing as opposed to allowing it just to happen.

• 17:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me ask you this, Anders. To what degree do you believe that choking is the factor or a main factor that actually separates an absolute top-tier performer from someone who's talented and so on, but doesn't reach the top tier? In other words, is the expert, is the professional, the very good performer who has learned to not choke?

• 17:40Speaker 06

  My experience is that choking is quite rare by those individuals that we study who are consistently excelling. And it seems to be almost part of being an expert is that you deal with the kind of situations that would be, you know, experienced as very high pressure for other people.

• 18:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's an interesting continuum. High-pressure performances can lead to choking, but expert performers who compete under pressure all the time tend to not choke. Of course, it does happen.

• 18:19Speaker 09

  For me, it was terrifying.

• 18:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jeremy Abbott was one of the best figure skaters in the world. He won the US Men's Championship four times and went to the Olympics in 2010 and 2014. Things didn't go so well at the Olympics.

• 18:35Speaker 10

  Opening with a quad toe right here. Oh, short of rotation, could not pull that landing together. Hard fall there. This is a disastrous performance.

• 18:49Speaker 09

  It was unlike any other situation I'd ever been in. All of my practice and all of my preparation, once I got to the Games, everything really kind of leading up to that moment at both Olympics in Vancouver and in Sochi, I was really excited. I could see the rings. And the moment I went out in Vancouver and in Sochi, every insecurity that I had about myself and about my skating was just magnified by a million. And I was just so focused on not wanting to make a mistake. I was in the wrong mindset.

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Both times, Abbott failed to medal in the individual events. He retired from competitive skating in 2016, and he now coaches in Detroit. He uses his own experience to help the next generation.

• 19:37Speaker 09

  I should have been focusing less on outcome and less on performance and more just on the process and getting my job done and accomplishing what I do every single day in training and really taking all of that experience and all of that work and putting it to use rather than focusing on what if that, what if this, you know, anything could happen. But whenever I skated my best, it was never focusing on a placement or a point total or pleasing somebody else. It was always just, okay, I'm here and I'm going to do a job. And that was when I always skated my best.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's precisely those times when you do start thinking too much that you can flub a performance.

• 20:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  See on Bylock again.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  And so, any situation that causes you to attend in ways that you might not normally can mess you up.

• 20:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So can I just say, I love our species. I think we're kind of awesome. I mean, we have some flaws and so on, but doesn't it seem like a weird counterbalance that we tend to choke most in the circumstances, as you've been telling us, that matter the most to us? Doesn't that just seem like a design flaw?

• 20:55Speaker 03

  It is interesting. I mean, I guess you could say that maybe we haven't adapted to those situations yet. I mean, we've certainly been in social situations for a long time, but our level of self-consciousness and metacognitive ability, the ability to know what we and others are thinking, is something that's probably fairly recent, evolutionarily wise.

• 21:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So we should probably take a look at how we think differently and perform differently as the stakes rise. That would have made me very nervous. That's coming up after the break. Also, the gory details of Jean Van de Veld's meltdown.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  What are you doing? What on earth are you doing?

• 21:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what you can do to not choke.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've actually shown that getting people to just jot down their thoughts and worries can be beneficial.

• 21:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up right after this.

• 21:57Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 22:41Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 22:59Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:32Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  When psychologists think about choking under pressure, they consider a variety of thought processes that may be subtle and hard to measure. Economists look at choking a bit differently.

• 24:22Speaker 11

  Say that you would have paid me a million dollar. If I'll give the best interview of the week.

• 24:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uri Ganesi is an economist at the University of California, San Diego.

• 24:32Speaker 11

  That would have made me very nervous. That would have made me put more effort into this. When we look at incentives in economics, we think about two ways in which it's going to affect us. The first is that if I'll pay you more, you'll put more effort in the task. And the second assumption is that more effort will lead to better performance. That's not necessarily true, and that's the part of choking. It might be that I can push you so much to try so hard that it will actually backfire and you'll perform worse.

• 25:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ganesi co-authored one of the foundational economics papers on choking. It's called Large Stakes and Big Mistakes. He and his colleagues ran experiments in a variety of places, including India.

• 25:19Speaker 11

  The reason we wanted to go to India is that over there, our money can go a long way. So we went to some villages in India in which the daily wage was so low that we could offer them up to six months of salary in our experiment if they did perfectly well.

• 25:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Each participant completed a series of tasks. Some were creative.

• 25:40Speaker 11

  So the creative one was, for example, to pack pieces of metal into a box in an efficient way.

• 25:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some tasks were cognitive.

• 25:51Speaker 11

  A memory game in which I would read up numbers and you listen to me. And then at some point, I'll say, stop. And then you'll have to recall the last three numbers that I mentioned.

• 26:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And some tasks were athletic.

• 26:03Speaker 11

  Throwing dart-like balls, so balls on a target and things like that.

• 26:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  The payout for successful completion of the task was variable. In some cases, you'd get 10 cents. In others, a dollar, and in others, $10.

• 26:20Speaker 11

  And $10 was about what they made in a month over there. I hope that you agree with me that six months of pay is a lot of money that would make you work much harder, right?

• 26:32Speaker 11

  And the question was, are you going to be better actually when you work harder?

• 26:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  As Ganesi noted earlier, it's a standard assumption in labor economics that higher pay leads to more effort and that more effort leads to better performance, or at least higher productivity. What happened in this case when the stakes were raised all the way to $10?

• 26:51Speaker 11

  So the findings were striking. You see reduction in success rates across the board. All six games that we played resulted in lower success rate when the incentives were really high.

• 27:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the three-digit memory game, roughly 40% of the participants succeeded under low incentives. Under high incentives, the success rate was just 20%. For the dartball game, the success rate under low incentives was 10% and around 7% under high incentives. For the metal packing game, under low incentives, 25% of the participants succeeded. Under high incentives, nobody succeeded. Or, put another way, at least 25% of them choked.

• 27:37Speaker 11

  Actually, we were a bit surprised by this experiment because we included tasks in which we expected that effort will increase performance.

• 27:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if you think about it, you can see why the researchers maybe shouldn't have been so surprised. In these experiments, increased effort isn't simply a matter of putting in more time, the way you might with an assignment at work or a project at school. It was trying to execute the same task with and without pressure. So Ganesi and his colleagues wanted to learn more about what sort of tasks make us succumb to pressure. They ran some more experiments at MIT using students as their research subjects. Some experiments involved simple manual tasks, like punching alternating keyboard keys as fast as possible.

• 28:23Speaker 11

  It's really something that, you know, if you do it for long enough, it's boring. So if I'll pay you more, you'll try maybe harder. And we believe that more effort will actually increase your performance.

• 28:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Other tasks were more cognitive, like adding numbers in matrices.

• 28:38Speaker 11

  When you think about cognitive tasks, you probably reach your optimal behavior, your best. Very fast. And now if I'm really, really making it high incentives, you might actually start being, you know, distracted.

• 28:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once again, there were low and high incentive versions of each task. Since the dollar doesn't go as far in Massachusetts as it does in India, the rewards here were up to $30 for the low incentive experiments and up to $300 for the high.

• 29:08Speaker 11

  So what we found is that for the key pressing task, when you increase the incentives from up to $30 to up to $300, they switch from about 40% succeeding to 80% succeeding. On the other end, when you have to add up numbers, the more cognitive one, we see a sharp decrease from 65% to 40%. So when you actually have to put some cognitive effort into this, getting the incentives to be ridiculously high could actually be a bad idea.

• 29:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  This would seem to be pretty good evidence that when activities involve some thinking, we're more susceptible to choking. Or, as you've probably heard from a lot of people over the years, coaches and teachers and counselors of all sorts, you are capable of doing some amazing things if you can only get your brain out of the way. But that's obviously harder than it sounds. So how can you do that? How can you prepare yourself to not crumble under the very circumstances that matter most?

• 30:18Speaker 04

  The choke is an amazing thing in politics because it really does destroy careers.

• 30:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Jardine teaches political communication at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He coaches students how to perform well in high stakes public forums like presidential debate.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  We saw it with Rick Perry. And we always tell people in a debate, an interview, don't say, here's five things I would do, or here's seven things that I would do, because you put too much pressure on the brain. The minute you say it, literally, the second those words leave your mouth, you're thinking, oh, my God, what in the hell are the five?

• 30:53Speaker 08

  And welcome to CNBC's Republican Presidential Debate.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  And in that debate, if you remember, Rick Perry, governor of Texas, one of the frontrunners for his party, stands up in a debate and says,

• 31:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone. Commerce, education, and the, what's the third one there? Let's see, the third one, I can't, sorry. Oops.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  And he'd have been better off, after he couldn't remember the third, to say, well, listen, there's scores of agencies I would cut. So whether there's three or 13, you know me, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna take a knife to that damn budget, because it's too overbloated. He probably saves his career.

• 31:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  The third agency Perry wanted to cut, he later said, was the Department of Energy. In the kind of twist that can only happen in Washington, Rick Perry now runs the Department of Energy. So, yeah. Origanezy at UC San Diego says that in some instances, choking now can lead to more success later.

• 32:01Speaker 11

  So actually, if I choke once, the penalty could be so high, I would feel so bad about myself, that maybe in the future, I'll be much more prepared, which might actually help in performing under pressure.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  You need to prepare for the complexities of the situations that you are going to encounter in real world.

• 32:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anders Ericsson again.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  So if they made a mistake the first time, now this second time, they can avoid that same mistake.

• 32:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  What you're describing to me, sounds an awful lot like deliberate practice, then, yes?

• 32:35Speaker 06

  Well, I think you're completely right, because that's exactly what we're hoping, you know, is to take the real world situation, and then actually find some version of it that you would have more control over, so you can actually practice and get immediate feedback, make revisions, and then basically apply that same acquired skill in the real world situation.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  How do we get people to focus on aspects of their performance that are going to be beneficial for success, especially in those situations that are most problematic?

• 33:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  See on Bylock again, going back to her golf experiments.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  So, we investigated whether going quicker, for example, might help eliminate poor performance under pressure, or having one key swing thought that encapsulates your entire stroke might be better. And we showed that some of that was successful. And it leads to the opposite idea that if you really want to mess your buddy up on the back nine, you just say, hey, that was a great shot. What were you doing with your elbow?

• 33:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, great. So you're helping us make people choke more, but what else can you tell us about, in this domain at least, learning to choke less?

• 33:54Speaker 03

  We also showed that getting used to this type of hyper attention to detail that sometimes comes with performance can be helpful. So, really inoculating yourself against the high-pressure situations. You see this with students who practice taking time tests. You see this with military pilots and firefighters and people who practice under some of the types of conditions they're going to perform under. And you even see this if you walk by a college football stadium Friday afternoon, the music blaring, getting the players used to what it's going to feel like to be in that big stadium. And this is true in really big, important situations, but it's also true in those little things

• 34:37Speaker 03

  we do every day. So if you're going to give a toast at a wedding, practicing doing it while people are watching you. And if no one is willing to watch you, videotape yourself. Anything that gets you used to the kinds of all eyes on you.

• 34:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so put yourself in realistic and stressful practice situations. What else?

• 34:55Speaker 03

  We know on the athletic field, invoking ways to take your mind off the step-by-step of what you're doing in the moment, especially on those easier performances. So whether it's singing a song, or thinking about your pinky toe, or thinking about where you want the ball to land, rather than how it's going to get there.

• 35:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So this is basically, it sounds like if you would summarize all of those activities under one umbrella, it might be like distracting your mind, or streamlining that. How do you think about that?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  I'd say controlling what you're focusing on.

• 35:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so controlling what you're focusing on, realistic practice situations. What else?

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Rethinking how you're feeling. So we know that when people remind themselves that sweaty palms and beating heart aren't a sign they're going to fail, but a sign that they're awake and ready to go and that their body is shunting important nutrients to their mind, that can be really effective.

• 35:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, is that a charade or is that real? I mean, if my palms are sweaty, isn't that an indication that I am anxious? And that if I just tell myself, well, it's not really anxiety. It's really my body shunting nutrients. I mean, is that a self lie that I profit from? Or is that realistically, you know, a counter-truth?

• 36:07Speaker 03

  First of all, I will just say that I like placebo effects. And I have no problem with that. But I think it's a real truth because, you know, if your heart wasn't beating, to some extent, you'd be dead, right? And those sweaty palms can be an indication that you're alert and aroused and ready to go. And arousal doesn't have to be a bad thing, right? It's bad when we start thinking it's bad and then we start changing our performance.

• 36:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love how your counterfactual is always, or you could be dead. So that is a very useful. I mean, that's inspiring. Like, I don't want that. So, yeah, okay.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a good opposition.

• 36:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a great opposition. Yeah, no, I'm serious. I totally like it because another piece of advice I've always heard is like envision the worst outcome, right? And then like think about how this will not be anywhere near as bad as that. Like if I'm about to hit a high stakes golf shot, I think, well, what if instead like the club head comes off the club in the backswing and kills my friend?

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's way worse.

• 37:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right? That's way worse. So anything from there is like gravy.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And we've actually shown that getting people to just jot down their thoughts and worries can be beneficial, sort of downloading them from mind when they feel stressed out. And one of the things that that does is get you to realize maybe it's not such a big deal, right? What you're doing is not as big of a deal as your friend getting hit with the club and dying.

• 37:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Again, always comes back to dying. What about other means of directing the mind, whether meditation perhaps?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's lots of research showing that meditative practices can help change how you focus and your ability to focus on what you want and get rid of what you don't. That's true with visualizing positive performance outcomes ahead of time. And really focusing on why you should succeed, right? What are the factors that you've practiced well? You've got this. You've had situations like this in the past and they've gone really well.

• 38:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  But then there are situations that you haven't had in the past, situations that are way bigger, way more pressurized than anything you could have prepared for.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  On the eve of that championship, Jean Van de Veld was ranked 152nd in the world. And people that are 152nd in the world don't win major championships.

• 38:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brandel Chambley again, talking about the unlikely but apparently inevitable British Open victory of Jean Van de Veld.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  The golfing gods are with him. Some golfing gods with the young man at this moment. And it'll be interesting again to see what he does now.

• 38:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Remember, Van de Veld's name had already been engraved on the trophy. All he had to do was score a double bogey six or better on the par four 18th hole at Carnoustie.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  But it was a devastatingly hard hole, no question about it. There is OB to the left, a burn down the right, a bunker sort of out there to the right.

• 39:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  OB is out of bounds, a burn is a Scottish term for a creek.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  What made this so unbelievable to watch is that it was a combination of what looked to be good breaks that were actually horrible breaks.

• 39:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rather than playing his tee shot safe with an iron, Van de Veld stuck with what he'd done all week and he hit driver.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  He pushed his drive way, way right.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Oh, you lucky little rascal.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  He's... He's pushed that away and missed the water. He's almost... well, he's right in front of the 17th tee.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  That's a great break. If it had gone in the burn, he would have done the math and thought, can't go for it. There's no way I can go for this because I can lay up three hit on four, two putts, six. I'm an open champion. So now he pulls a two iron out. So he's going to be safe going to the right.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Well, you do... I don't believe this. Well...

• 40:15Speaker 02

  What is going on here?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  So it hits the stands, really hit a pole. Then it's going to go in the burn.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Well, let's have a look where he is. He's still short of the burn. I think really if anybody needs an advisor, he does at this... at this moment.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  But it doesn't go in the burn. It hits the bricks, the rocks, and it bounces over the burn. Great break.

• 40:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lion just two in the hay, right? So not so bad.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Just two, and he's 30 yards away. 30 yards away. So two great breaks. He goes down there and there with renewed hope. All he's got to do is get this wedge out. But again, this is where I would imagine

• 40:56Speaker 01

  the real choking started. Because now then, he's in a really difficult situation. And that's where he hit a shot that was really just hard to describe. I mean, he... it's like he stopped swinging halfway down.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  What are you doing?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  What on earth are you doing? No, Jean-Pierre, would somebody kindly... go and stop him. Give him a large brandy and mop him down.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And the ball went right in the burn. And then it became surreal. And... He thinks he can play it.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  He's gone gaga because this is, uh, this is quite... I've never seen anything like it before and to attempt to hit the ball out of there is pure madness.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  So here he is, pants up, and he decides he can't play it. So now he gets to go back and drop it.

• 41:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  First good decision he's made on the hole, maybe.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  That's right, but, but the lie forced him to make a good decision. And here's how you get disasters. It's never just one thing. It's always a confluence of two or three or four things that were almost unprecedented. So now he drops the ball, taking the penalty shot. So he's, he's three in, four out, hitting five. Five is in the bunker.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  He played a similar shot to the one he plucked into the birdie.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Now he's got an easy bunker shot. Bunker shots are not difficult for professional golfers. He gets it out to six feet. Now here's the thing to remember, is that he makes that putt.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Please give him one good putt. Please.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And I am almost certain that when he made that putt, he thought he had won.

• 42:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, that's why he gives the fist pump. Cause he looked ecstatic, yeah?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  I think he thought he had won. Because I think in the confusion, he lost count. I've done it before. He lost count because he reacted as if he had won the championship.

• 42:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then he looks around like, why is everybody not cheering crazily for me?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  His golfing brain stopped about 10 minutes ago, I think.

• 43:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Vandeveld hadn't won. He made a triple bogey seven, which put him in a three-man playoff for the Open Championship. He lost the playoff to Paul Lorie. Jean Vandeveld never did win a major championship.

• 43:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  We called up Vandeveld ourselves recently to check in with him.

• 43:32Speaker 12

  Yes, Stephen, I can hear you. Hello.

• 43:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Unfortunately, the connection was very poor, so the tape isn't really worth playing. We'll post the transcript on Freakonomics.com, so you can read it there if you'd like. Anyway, we had a nice chat about his family, his continuing involvement with golf. Vandeveld was instrumental in bringing the Ryder Cup to France this fall. And of course, that terrible 18th hole at Carnoustie in 1999. I asked if it was difficult to talk about it. "It's never been difficult," he said. "Just after not winning the Open, it was painful, but you're a professional athlete." I asked what it felt like standing on the 72nd tee with a three-shot lead. "I stood there pretty confident, to be honest," he said. "I wasn't overly emotional or emotional at all. My nerves were holding pretty OK."

• 44:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Vandeveld if, during the long and difficult adventure on the 18th hole, he had indeed lost track of his score and the lead. "Definitely not," he said. "Lying five in the bunker," he told me. "I knew I needed to hole it to win the tournament." And then I asked him this. "You became famous for not having won the Open. Your 72nd hole has been called the worst choke in golfing history. Do you think that's true or fair?" And he said-

• 44:53Speaker 12

  I think we need to ask the definition of choke.

• 44:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  "I think we need to ask the definition of choke." "I think I had two days to choke," he said. "So a choke? You know, I wouldn't call that a choke, without a doubt. I would probably use a different word, but certainly not that one."

• 45:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Earlier, I'd asked Randall Shambly how Vandeveld had handled the meltdown.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I mean, his remarks afterwards were as measured and respectful and appropriate and magnanimous as anybody I've ever heard that had gone through something so traumatic. And I gained a great deal of respect for him immediately.

• 45:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  A lot of other people gained respect for him, too. When I asked Van de Veld himself how that one hole changed his life, he said, you know, it's very easy to win with grace. It's a lot harder to lose with it. And without patronizing anybody or blowing my own trumpet, I would say that the way that I see life and the way that I've accepted what happened, I believe that's what people like. It's in my nature to see it the way that I see it. And that's the end of that.

• 46:00Speaker 12

  It's in my nature to see it the way that I see it. And that's the end of that.

• 46:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wish Jean Van de Veld were still playing competitive golf, only so I could root for him to win every week. I agree that losing with grace is not easy, and I agree he accomplished that. And as Brandel Shambly points out, the loss did come with some consolation points. Think about this now. You know, that adage that nobody remembers who finished second? Well, in this particular instance, hardly anybody remembers who won.

• 46:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Remember, go to Freakonomics.com if you'd like to read the transcript of the Jean Van de Veld interview. We've also posted on Stitcher Premium, a bonus episode, our full interview with Brandel Shambly. We post a lot of extras on Stitcher Premium, as well as our full archive ad free. Just go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics and use the promo code Freakonomics to get one month free. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, there is another high stakes sporting event every summer. It takes place on bicycles. Only one man has ever won it seven times. And only one man had those seven titles taken away from him for cheating. You know, my line used to always be, I've passed every drug test they've ever given me.

• 47:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think you could have won any Tour de France without doping? Or was it just impossible? Well, it depends what the other 199 were doing. Well, considering what was actually happening at the time, considering the opponents you were actually racing against. Yeah, say I did nothing. Yeah, if you did nothing, could you have won? 0% chance. A no holds barred conversation about the winning, the cheating, the lying, the confessing and the rebuilding with this man. My name is Lance Armstrong and I'm... What do I do? That's a really good question. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 48:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippon, and Andy Meisenheimer. The music you hear throughout the episode is composed by Luis Guerra. Freakonomics Radio can be found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. Or give Stitcher Premium a shot. Go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. Use the promo code Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Stitcher.

• 49:00Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 50:03Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 50:40Speaker 13

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