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Smart People Choke Under Pressure
People perceived as the most likely to succeed might also be the most likely to crumble under pressure.
A new study finds that individuals with high working-memory capacity, which normally allows them to excel, crack under pressure and do worse on simple exams than when allowed to work with no constraints. Those with less capacity score low, too, but they tend not to be affected by pressure.
I fall apart like a month-old spongecake if someone so much as asks me for the current time. That must mean I'm really bright, right? Right?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Donovan McNabb really is smart.
Damn! I had an intelligent and well developed response to that all thought out but when I got to the comment box my mind just went blank.
Okay, I'm sorry, but I think this is too good to not talk about.
In my Masters program, I took a course on the Psychology of Human / Computer Interaction. We talked a lot about human performance, and the topic of pressure (stress) came up.
She drew a graph showing that human performance actually goes up as stress increases, up to a certain point, and then performance drops again.
Then she drew on top of that the same graph for an expert in the field, and talked about how their performance goes even higher, and they can handle even more stress, until finally their performance drops off again.
Right after showing us this, she reminded us to get started early on our term papers.
I raised my hand with a smirk on my face and asked, "But, from what you've just shown us, shouldn't we wait until just before the paper is due, so our performance will be higher?"
She laughed and mumbled something (possibly a curse). =)
Education is the silver bullet.