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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.
Of course, no company would bother even thinking of these things, even though it would make them more productive with happier workers.
This comes as a surprise? People with a higher IQ tend to find that things come easier to them. Thus they do not deal with stress on a regular basis. When stress levels rise beyond what they are accustomed to (self induced stress caused from perfectionism) It's circuit overload. "Normal" people have to deal with stress regularly to accomplish a task. Thus they are more accustomed to it and can readily adapt.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Smart people are expected not to make mistakes and not to fail. We are all (even some of the smartest people) nothing but human, therefore we do make mistakes and sometimes fail. But, since you are smart people are likely to expect more from you.
"Let's see you get out of this.."
"You are so smart, why can't you..."
What people need to understand is that sometimes even the best of us make the wrong judgement. This things happen.
So the article says that lower-pressure tests should be incorporated into the MCAT or GMAT... because of course that's what you want in your doctor or manager: someone who cracks under pressure and can't remember what he was taught.
Intelligence, like good science, is useless if it's not applied properly or at all. The same can be said for this article...
I don't know how to feel about this...
I'm most certainly a 'geek', by all measures. I can't help but become totally immersed in whatever I find interesting...in depth and breadth.
However, I've always been noted for my ability to work best under pressure--without the pressure I either get nothing accomplished or I 'wander aimlessly forever'...I'm sure many of you can identify.
However, I'm an 'undercover.' Nobody I meet ever suspects that I have held engineer positions, owned my own business or spent multiple hours a day researching (anything of interest) in painful depth.
To sum it up, I think (without RTFA, admittedly) I think that it's far to dynamic of a subject to boil down to black-n-whites such as this.
But then again, perhaps I'm just not 'one of those'..."those" being the majority of geekdom.
colour me skeptical.
-Dan
Wow! You just generalized from a single example -- yourself. And you actually believe that you're intelligent? Well done.
You see that brine there? That's my brine.
Note that they said 93 students from Michigan State University. The ones who did well on standardized tests were already selected out - they went to better schools! :-P
This would explain why, under pressure, both groups wound up at about the same level. They were, after all, drawn at random from a population that was selected by the fact that they went to the same school, and both groups were selected in part by their performance on a timed, standardized test.
This study means that (assuming I'm a smart person, anyway) my apathetic, don't-give-a-shit "bad attitude" is actually an advantage. If I don't give a shit, I'm not pressured and therefore have more room in my working memory for task-related information, and I therefore do better.
So boss, don't take it personally when I appear to not care about the task at hand. It's not because I realize there's no reward in it for me if I do well, nor because in the back of my mind part of me would like to see the commissioned sales staff humiliated at the demo. It's because by not giving a shit, I'll do a better job. Really. It's absolutely true, or my name isn't David Leisure.
I can't remember historical dates worth anything, but I can remember pi to twenty-ish digits (down from fifty-ish in high school) and long random numbers used as passwords.
When it comes to things I want to do, I thrive on pressure, as it forces me to actually get it done before I start becoming apathetic about it (which is followed quickly by loathing and tends to result in difficulty getting it done).
When it comes to things I don't want to do, I have a hard time dealing with presure because I tend to wander off and do other things and never get back to it. When I'm doing something I don't want to do, the slightest thing will distract me hopelessly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That hardly sounded arrogant... and there's probably a couple of reasons why people consider you intelligent.
First, you have expertise in an area they find inscrutable and arcane... some Alpha-geeks in this forum can probably make a computer stand up and dance, and even the average slashdotter probably has far more knowledge than the average user.
Second, geeks often fit a cultural image of an intelligent person... a sort of misfit, weird professor paradigm. Sad to say, but sometimes just looking the part gets you further than your knowledge base.
Back on the subject of choking, consider that working/performing under pressure is a learned skill... it DOES NOT come naturally... quite the opposite, in fact. Your normal reaction is 180 degrees from what you need. I'm talking about the biological human reaction of adrenaline-dump, turn-off-higher-thought, shunt-blood-to-major-muscle-groups, and fight/run-your-ass-off. Reverting to lower-animal behavior isn't exactly conducive to complex problem solving. The US military has studied this in soldiers and special operations folks. They ran guys through very realistic scenarios, complete with EKG telemetry and some other physiologic monitoring. They found that "stress inoculation" in the form of realistic training, combined with experience allowed some individuals to operate much more effectively, instead of reverting to animal-level behaviors. Bottom line: the more you do it, the better you'll get.
Relax... you're normal. That veteran's seasoning and calm is only gained by experience.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
You know, you mean to be funny, but you have a point.
Doing well in stressful situations is due to training, preparation and self control, not because you are too stupid to get nervous about success.
The more you practice being in stressful situations, the easier it is to handle them.
My hypothesis is that if you have a history of doing well on standardized tests, you don't see them as pressure. They're almost fun. I did well on the GREs - but I did well on the SATs, PSATs, all the way back to the Iowa standardized tests in elementary school. When you have the belief "I'm good at standardized tests", standardized tests aren't a lot of pressure.
(In fact I felt nostalgic a few months ago when taking the NCCAOM Asian Bodywork Therapy exam, which is given with old-school fill-in-the-bubble, #2 pencil forms, the way we used to take GREs and SATs back in the old days.)
But like you, I felt pressured in grad school. I didn't do as well as I would have liked. A decade later, and having recently gone back to school for a while to study therapeutic bodywork, I think the problem was that I had never developed good study habits - because I'd never had to.
Up until my junior year of college, pretty much everything I found interesting was fairly easy to learn. I actually was trying to do a double degree program - physics and computer science - in four years. (Not just a double major, mind you, but a double degree - requiring 150 credits. Ah, hubris.) I had the belief "I'm good in school," so there wasn't a lot of pressure or stress.
I managed to keep chugging along with the CS program, but the physics...when I hit the upper level classes, I just didn't get it. (Looking back I think the first problem was that I never got a firm enough grasp on differential equations.) And not getting the material was almost a completely new experience!
Sure, I'd hit the odd snag in trying to learn something new, but a few days of poking at it usually resolved it. This was different. Weeks of staring at it didn't make it go into my brain. I ended up dropping the physics side of my plan, finished my CS degree with good enough grades to get into grad school - where I hit the same problem of not knowing what to do when the way became difficult.
If I knew then what I know now, I might have tried such radical ideas as looking at the recommended supplemental reading, taking advantage of instructor's office hours, and studying with fellow students. But I'd gotten so far without even doing that, that it simply didn't occur to me. Maybe I even felt embarassed to try to get help. Pretty dumb for a "smart" person, eh?
So don't be like me! If things have been easy and suddenly get difficult, take advantage of all those support systems that "average" students use.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Stop reading and posting so much on slashdot. Spend more time reading your books.
The most important thing anybody can learn is how to learn. Find somebody to teach you how to learn.
Again, stay away from sites like slashdot.
economics can get extremely complex once you get past the intro micro and macro courses. one of my international economics profs would give a 2 hr exam with only 2 questions. i would spend the first hour creating an accurate model and quantifying the expected results... the other hour going through the theory behind the various assumptions and then explaining what should be done through policy.
in fact, i would argue that economics is more complex than engineering because economics lacks defined laws and defined variables. there simply is no way to model the economy perfectly because of its enormity
I have seen something related. I work with lots of engineers. Most want to be told what to do. They seem to want to put a high level of thinking on a very focused task. When the thinking becomes broad, they tend shy away.
People seem to need rules to break.
In my experience with engineering, the more you can work _without_ information the more valuable you are. But engineers always want to get all the information before they begin...
Umm, I think you're confusing intelligence with training.
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
The trick is to apply enough pressure, but not too much. It's the part of parenting I fear the most.
I would have appreciated (in the long run) higher standards for my academic performance in school. I was very smart, but not motivated.
Not to say I blame my parents...I think they did a great job with me, and I understand the conundrum they were in. I do hope I can strike a better balance. If I had gotten in the habit of getting better grades in elementary and high school, I'd have had a much easier time in college. (Because I wouldn't have needed to work two jobs, because I would have had a scholarship.)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Many people wish they were perfectionists.
I sure as hell don't. There are several mottos I live by. One of them is "Perfect is the enemy of Good." What this means is, don't go for perfection, you won't achieve it and you'll screw up something else--a deadline or something--by trying. Make it good. Don't try to make it perfect.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Actually, I believe that I read somewhere (though I could be wrong and this may be just opinion) that with both humans and computation multitasking can make you do as much as 50% less work than if you did things sequentially.
However, the human brain tends to be designed such as multitasking makes you think you're doing just as well with each task as you would be with just one, mainly because it doesn't factor in timelosses due to 'context switching' as it were.
For example, if you're working on a document and playing an online game at the same time (some people I know do this!). You'll remember the decent frags you scored, and you'll remember how much you wrote. You won't remember the time you spent getting reorientated in the game, or working out which sentence you were in in the middle of a document.
That dart challenge (as stated) is easy if indoors. Shoot straight down. Fasten the gun exactly over the center at the given distance then pull the trigger.
Gets tougher if you have to do it outside (wind) or can't do vertical or both.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Your example seems to me to be entirely about free form creativity! You may be using a subset of SQL, but you're using a superset of that subset's intended usefulness. So I would say that rooting like that takes quite a bit of thinking outside the box.
Cheers.
Actually that's a common failure of management who can't achieve the same results correctly.
The correct way is to give someone more work (and reward/feedback!) as you observe. If you're doing it right you spot thier limit BEFORE they reach it and keep them at the right level BELOW that limit.
The most efficient point is well below that limit, and is usually fun to be at if you don't outright hate your job.
And absolutely make shure they know when you are pleased with them, feedback is critical, especially when they're doing a good job. And if you don't actually mean it when you give them good feedback then you are screwing up. You honestly have to want them to do well for thier sakes as well as your own or at best your going to be yet another boss, and not a manager nor a leader.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Why engineers want info up front can be broken up roughly into the following problems. Usually it's a combination.
1. Bad management.
It's more common than you think to be blamed for not reading the client's mind. (You should have just known that when they explicitly wrote "save when exitting every field", they actually meant "we don't want the info to disappear, but we don't really want disk access every time we hit TAB." Whatever gave them the idea that info just disappears in a form. It's your fault when they come back complaining about performance.)
Or when it's not outright "you're to blame, you horrible monster", it's being asked to do overtime to "fix" it. Because the boss is too weak to tell a big client that those changes cost extra time to implement.
I can tell you that it doesn't take more than 1-2 such projects, to give one the idea "no, you don't. Not again. Give me a good spec up front this time." Because anything short of a full spec simply comes back to screw you with a chainsaw lately.
2. Bad management again: changing the same thing back and forth, just because the client can't make up his/her mind.
It's been said that the most depressive thing you can do for example to a prisoner is to just make him do not something that's hard work, but something that's obviously _useless_. Such as asking the prisoners to move a big pile of sand from here to there, and then back to the same point. That "I'm doing useless stuff" thought saps someone's self-esteem and ultimately even health faster than if you tortured them or made them break rocks with a pickaxe.
And the same applies to software projects.
I've _actually_ been in one project where for a whole _year_ the client manager couldn't make up his mind whether he wants the reports landscape or portrait. Never mind that the program included a report designer, where he can lay them out in whatever goddamn way he needs. No siree, bob. He's not gonna accept the program until the reports are landscape... then portrait... then landscape again... then portrait again. Repeat ad nauseam. For a year.
Going through something like this will make it _very_ tempting to say "screw this, I want a signed spec up front".
3. Bad design.
Most programs are basically Write-Only. People give no thought to maintenance later, and even the smallest change means rewriting half the stuff.
Now I'm not a fan of extreme programming as such. (And please, if anyone feels like taking it as an opportunty to preach, have mercy and spare both my time and yours.) But I do think that they did get the basic ideas right. (It's just the turning it all to the max that I disaggree with.) Programs should be written to be easily changed.
4. Lack of test-cases.
That's probably the worst anti-pattern. So you most often have not only a spaghetti program that's hard to change, but it's not even possible to be sure you didn't break something else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Piling tons of extra work upon your programmers, and unrealistic deadlines, comes back to bite you in the ass in various forms. Of course, a true PHB won't see it, and can pat themselves on the back for "getting the most out of the people". When in fact they're getting the least.
1. Bad code.
The thing about programming is that there's at least 20 ways to achieve anything. About 18 of them involve cutting corners and making a bad product, just to keep that unrealistic schedule the boss gave you.
Making and implementing a good design takes time. Throwing together a piss-poor Write-Only hack takes a lot less time. Guess which one you get if you just mindlessly pile more work on people.
Sure, it looks like you're getting some extra work done at first... until it's time to debug or maintain it. Then you start finding gems like "oh dear, instead of making a proper connection manager class, they've just directly accessed and _changed_ internal variables in other modules and got their connection from there." Any change suddenly involves a lot more work, because instead of a clear orthogonal design, it's a spaghetti mess.
Oops. It bit you in the ass.
(And so far _twice_ I've not only encountered such messes, but had to deal with them because even the original coders didn't want to touch it any more.)
2. Lack of test cases, or even of manual testing.
_The_ more common excuse for lack of that is that there's no time for it. Pile enough work on someone to give them the idea "hmm... I could still make it if I dropped the test cases", and those will be the first to go.
And it only makes problem 1 suddenly cost 10 times more time. Because not only you never know which other module messes with the innards of your class, you can't even tell if you broke something when changing it.
True personal story: oops, changing the table model also caused all the reports to stop working. And it was only found after we delivered it to the client.
True personal story: oops, the program was packed by an overworked coleague with the test templates instead of the real templates. Some real business partners got bullshit emails as a result. (If you thought MS's inapropriate comments in code were fun, emailing stuff is more fun.)
3. Tired people are stupid people. (Not meant as an offense. I'm stupid when extremely tired too.)
Every notch you go above someone's limit, and every hour of overtime they have to do for more than 1-2 weeks in a row, soon starts reducing their productivity. They make more mistakes. They need more time to find them and to fix them. They see less of the picture, so each fix is more likely to break something else.
4. Lowered morale also lowers productivity dramatically.
Nerds are a funny breed. If you overworked a factory worker, they'd be more likely to tell you "no, sorry, this is as far as I'll go." Or just do as much as they can, and pack their bags cheerfully when the clock struck 5 PM.
Nerds tend to be more insecure. A lot are autistic too, so they can't even tell how bad or not bad the situation is. They'll go beyond their physical limits, rather than risk disappointing the boss.
Unfortunately, as they say, "there ain't no such thing as a free meal". The extra effort comes at the cost of tiredness and lowered morale. Either of which alone can count for up to an order of magnitude productivity, if brought to extreme levels.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
First off, I think the methodology is flawed in thinking that people can be broken into two groups of "smart" or "not-so-smart" people. That's ridiculous. They might as well have called the groups for this experiment, "nervous" and "not-so-nervous" people because that's basically what they were. I am not sure where the "smart" aspect comes in. There are varying degrees of intelligence, and no doubt those that are truly smart could easily deal with a pressure situation, so what they ended up creating were two groups, neither of which were ultimately of truly "smart" people. I think there's a high degree of extrapolation in place when you claim that high memory volume equates to intelligence or resourcefulness in a means that most people consider "smart."
Ultimately, this goofy study seemed to confirm that "ignorance is bliss." Thank you Professor Obvious. I wonder how much taxpayer money went into that boondoggle?
Three rules to live by, if you're a manager:
1) Make decisions
2) Get out of the way
3) Be there
Managers who waffle at making decisions end up with an aimless and very frustrated crew.
Managers who try to dictate the "how" part of creativity go too far and the result is an equally frustrated crew.
Managers who operate in "aloof mode" are equally destructive. They think, "I'll just be so hands-off. They'll love me for that." But what they really need to be doing is removing roadblacks, quashing in-fighting, being a good arbitrator, just being available.
Hire experts, give them a destination and a compass, and let them navigate the waters. Good managers do exist. If you've ever worked for one, you know what I'm talking about. Work can be a real joy!
That is one of the things with our (german) education system that gets me everytime when tests come up. I can't memorize details because in the years before college when I learned half a dozen programming languages and lots of other stuff on my own I only learned the basic structures knowing the details were only one search in google away. Tests create a totally artificial environment for todays standards where you can use no written material at all and have to memorize all that detail bullshit you forget a few weeks later anyway since you don't use it.
Linux is not Windows
You made misconception of working memory and memorizing things.
Working memory is tiny little cache that fits 7+-2 items, thats the memory people use to operate things. Its not a permanent storage its few registers to keep few things in your conciusness, for quick recovery.
However that working memory can fit ANYSIZED objects there. So with experience on certain subject you start considering bigger compounds as single object, and with that you can fit bigger things in your working memory.
Consider you have L1cache, RAM and DISK. L1cache is working memory that well you erase all the time, when you operate on things, and it lasts few seconds, RAM is short term memory that holds for half hour or something similar [Or less my disk isn't error free], and long term memory is disk where people do MEMORIZE things.
Smart people have good working memory and short time memory while knowledgeable people have written lots of stuff to their permanent storage.
Now I have good working memory and reasonable RAM but my disk has lots of bad sectors, and error correction coprocessor that might retrieve the data in a few hours too late...
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
The original poster was actually referring to a specialization of Pauling's rule of optimal Vitamin C doses ("double the dose until you get diarrhea; then lower it back down until you get rid of it, then you are set"). May work for those doses, but definitely not with people: people break (get de-motivated) fairly easily, so it's important to avoid the breaking point.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Check out Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina. It's a nice article (the guy is a shareware developer-turned-motivational speaker) and it gives a very simple solution, which can be surprisingly effective. Set a timer and just work 30 minutes on the task. Work on any aspect of it, do whatever you can/like/want, but work on this task. After 30 minutes go eat a cookie. Repeat. Do it 10 times and you've just spent 5 hours on the task, which was probably enough to do a lot of progress.
I came to realise recently how horrible it is to be a perfectionist. I can at least feel happy that I don't hate myself for not being 100% perfect, but because of it I dropped out of a M.Sc. program - I just couldn't force myself to do crappy projects, to go to exams not knowing the subject perfectly, etc. So I didn't go to exams and didn't finish the projects. Meanwhile, the rest of the group (95% of whom were much less capable than I was) didn't have any problem going to the exam and trying to fake knowing the subject and making some crap that often passed for a project.
It can be really sad. I can be really productive as a perfectionist, but not all tasks/projects are equally suitable. There are many things I just can't force myself to work on.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.