That being said, it is logical to argue that choking is correlated to not trying to be the alpha male/female, which could mean one is more likely to survive. 5 studs with no fear and a desire to be the best would end up fighting to be the one alpha male, and would have a 20% chance of survival, where as people in a tribe who wanted to be competent enough to justify their existence, but not too successful to be deemed a threat, would likely have a higher survival ratio.

The fight-flight explanation for choking doesn’t seem able to handle this, as it would predict that coaches would want opponents to have to react to high-pressure situations as soon as possible to maximize choking. This example still may reinforce the Yerkes-Dodson Law angle, though, because of the important distinction that this is a simple physical and not a complex mental task. Perhaps an optimal level of arousal for a familiar mechanical task like shooting a free throw would be achieved by an immediate reaction. Calling a timeout could interfere with this, not so much by increasing anxiety and nerves, but by decreasing arousal–killing the athlete’s buzz. The problem I see with this is that anyone who has ever shot a free throw knows that subjectively it feels like you’ll perform better if you’re calm, not excited–ergo rituals like a certain number of dribbles or a deep breath before shooting. (Not to mention the western movie truism in the post.)

Both of these options are indicators of the failure of the alpha-wolf or avoidance strategies. Better to be the bully, beat up the bully or, failing both, avoid the bully–than be the bully’s target.

@OP
Another possibility: maybe we like to orchestrate silent coups. Maybe we want to impress, but we don’t want our methods to be known, thereby eroding the perception that our authority came about effortlessly and naturally. This would also help cover out tracks so that our tactics couldn’t be used against us later. So we hide our effort and shroud ourselves in an aura of infallibility by not betting our reputation on small ventures and instead staying prepared and making decisive bids for better positions. So it isn’t out of lack of confidence that we maintain the status quo, it is out of a desire to force others to internally justify our ascent to higher status thus making us more secure in the new position.

I guess this only makes sense if we see the group as hostile or dumb. I think Robin’s conclusions hold more water in modern society.

Also, regression to the mean doesn’t seem like an adequate explanation. Mathematically it must be true, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about causes.

I’m less confident about the answers to your specific questions than the rest of what I’ve said, but I’ll give it a try. The dominant response is something like the process that follows the strongest pathways in the brain. If doing the task is at all difficult or complicated, and not well-practiced (or built-in by evolution), then successful performance will require branching off into less obvious alternatives, overriding your first instinct, and so on. That means that favoring the dominant response will hurt your performance. Arousal may have evolved to favor the dominant response because high-stress situations were important ones where an animal benefited from acting decisively (as by fighting or fleeing). The peak is different for each task, so if evolution capped the maximum arousal level it would be at a level that is past the peak for the kinds of tasks that we’ve been discussing, like public speaking.

Anybody who was ever a nerd in childhood knows that the ability to think of witty things to say under pressure is much less adaptive in the face of bullies than the ability to cower and hide.

While we know stuttering is physiological, there is a psychological/situational component to the severity of the symptoms. Most stutterers can be completely fluent when they talk to themselves, their pets, small children. Many find the pressure of public speaking or dating makes their problem worse. Some find when they are acting, faking accents, or speaking to complete strangers they can be fluent.

To my knowledge there are no convincing studies of why, most theories simply suggest that stressful situations ‘overload’ the ability of the speech system to work as intended. But it’s not this simple, because certain kinds of stress have a beneficial effect.

The physical symptoms alone impair performance for any task having a high cognitive component. In a situation of perceived danger (to your body or status or …), blood in the brain is shunted away from areas of higher cognition and all areas not related to basic survival and routed to muscles in preparation for fighting or fleeing. The resultant hit to cognitive ability augments the performance impairments that would already occur due to inattention as a result of focusing so much on the physical symptoms of anxiety and the potential bad outcomes.

Vertigo happens because part of your brain is saying “that way is down” and another part is saying “that way can’t possibly be down, the ground is too far away”.