Choke To Submit?

From a submission wrestling perspective, “choke to submit” seems fairly obvious.

(By “if so,” that is, I mean that the relationship would be confirmed if people choked less on the 400 rupee punishment — since that would confirm that the performance losses were tracking induced risk preferences.)

Why do we experience vertigo when looking down from heights? Fear I can see, but why vertigo, the worst possible reaction? It seems like a similar but even more bizarre question.

Eliezer, re your proposed test, see my added to the post. Re vertigo, I have no idea.

Paul, these tests can be framed as gains or losses; I doubt such framing would make much difference.

Jadagul, fight-or-flight seems plausible, but also seems somewhat compatible with my story.

Jayson, you lost me.

Eliezer – when I was on a ski lift a long time ago, I started thinking about its safety…the chance of it collapsing was very small, I thought, so the only thing that could go wrong was if I got scared of the height and fainted – at which point I did actually start feeling intense vertigo and anxiety and thought I might actually faint! I managed to overcome it, but it was really puzzling for the reason you mentioned: why would my body decide to enter the very state that could do me the most harm?

The only thing I can think of now is the “Doomsday device” scenario put forth as an EvPsych explanation for maladaptive behavior like suicide or homicidal rampage – the triggering of the reaction doesn’t benefit the person who carries out the behavior, but it does help copies of the “gene for suicide” by giving credence to the pre-suicidal threats of others. Perhaps knowing that vertigo is the reaction your body will have – knowing your body will betray you – will make you even less likely to seek out heights, more so than if the reaction were “only” fear, which you might master.

I have a feeling that choking under large reward conditions could be explained by the Doomsday model in the same manner.

@Robin re Jayson,

For anyone who spends more time thinking about Brazilian jiu jitsu (or similar pursuits) than social signalling, your title evokes submission training rather than evolutionary tricks to avoid showing up the boss.

Perhaps it’s a simple numbers game. When facing superior numbers it might be best to show your belly, signal insecurity, etc.

Flopsweat strikes the new teacher in front of the kindergarten class, too.

Added: I first overcame my fear of public speaking by thinking the audience was beneath me, and my fear of asking women out by thinking they were not as far above me as I had previously thought.

A good way to do this might be to read news websites for women like jezebel.com.

Why do we experience vertigo when looking down from heights? Fear I can see, but why vertigo, the worst possible reaction? It seems like a similar but even more bizarre question.

I’ve noticed that I’m affected by vertigo when I look up something–a tall telephone pole, for instance. Perhaps vertigo was a way to discourage our ancestors from climbing up rock faces.

Pete: “the triggering of the reaction [vertigo] doesn’t benefit the person who carries out the behavior”

Yet arguably it does, if it keeps you away from heights in the future. The risk of death right now might be outweighed by that payoff later.

Unnamed, we can ask why performance vs. arousal is U-shaped, why we evolved to let arousal get past the peak, why arousal pushes the dominant response, or why doing well on mental tasks isn’t the dominant response.

Pete, James, John, and Allan, yes vertigo might helpfully push us to avoid places we might fall.

John, my claim was about relative status; so yes you can raise yourself or lower them.

Fenn, kindergarten teachers know their performance will be evaluated by parents and colleagues.

Katja, I doubt your being the best science student made you feel like the highest status person in your high school science class.

Eliezer, I suspect you already thought of yourself as high status then relative to your audience.

For some reason, I always found public performances to be thrilling rather than frightening. I suspect that, physiologically, it’s probably a very similar response to the stereotypical “stage fright”, but I interpret it differently.

“but it does help copies of the “gene for suicide” by giving credence to the pre-suicidal threats of others”

going to this kind of positive feedback loop would pretty much invalidate evolution all together.

This post provides interesting food for thought. On the one hand, the Solomon Asch social conformity studies–now rather dated–come to mind. In those experiments, subjects more frequently repeated obviously incorrect answers to questions after a confederate gave an incorrect answer. The test subjects demonstrated they knew the correct answer, but were apparently willing to self-handicap to conform their opinion to that of the confederate(s). On the other hand, if one accepts that humans are cognitive misers, a conflict between or overload of systems 1 and 2 cognition may give rise to “choking,” as in attempting to appear calm and composed while performing a demanding task in front of a group. Finite cognitive resources may simply be spread too thinly. Finally, what appears to be choking may in fact be a case of reversion to mean performance–a so-called winner’s curse.

Again, it seems like a lot of you are making evolution capable of explaining anything (and therefore nothing). For example, in the vertigo comments, if you can explain choking as making you avoid situations where you’ll fail, then there’s not much evolution can’t explain. Any potential observation could be rationalized as helping the gene.

I also wanted to point out that the exact opposite effect was observed in the infamous case of Joshua Bell, the violinist who started losing confidence when he played for random passers-by, and who stated how much more confident he was playing for (high-status) people who shelled out a lot of money to see him. Of course, in that case I see it as a case of the Emporer’s New Clothes … the music’s greatness is due to the illusion of thinking that other people think it’s great, while in a blind test no one’s actually willing to listen to it.

Please define success in life.

I think choking is a death spiral that starts with being nervous about making a bad impression (which in the ancestral environment might lower your status in the minds of everyone you know, potentially having catastrophic effects, such as making you undesirable to all females in your tribe [if you’re male]). It becomes a genuine feedback spiral when thinking about your nervousness and the potential bad outcomes and possibly focusing your attention on the physical symptoms of distress cause you to become even more nervous, which causes you to perceive the danger to be greater, your symptoms to get stronger, etc…

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.

An interesting question. You might get some insight by looking at studies of stutterers/stammerers, i.e. people who literally choke on their words.

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.

Robin, the difference with the performance-arousal U-curve is that the answers to most of the questions aren’t specific to humans, and that the poor performance is a consequence of a process that often improves performance. If there’s an evolutionary story it goes back to our distant pre-primate ancestors (like Jadagul’s fight-or-flight story). This doesn’t mean that status is completely irrelevant – arousal will generally be higher when the stakes are higher, and a high status audience could raise the stakes just like large financial incentives do. But it seems unlikely that we’re dealing with an evolutionary adaptation based on status, and especially unlikely that it’s an adaptation to perform worse that’s based on status.

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.”

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.

This post and many of the comments seems to take as a given that evolution had to have some good reason for the way humans behave. Perhaps it is just a random “bad” trait that has survived that has not been bred out yet. Or, perhaps natural selection has been lessened to an extent, and so this bad trait is on a comeback.

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.

Seems to me that mal-adaptation to the modern human environment. Most early situations generating a need for fight-or-flight levels of arousal would have been largely physical in nature. Also, the ability to “warm up” quickly to such levels of arousal based on fear of the situation would have been adaptive as well.

Alas, modern situations that are fear inducing tend to be less about running fast and more about thinking fast, so we’re left with over-arousal as compared to the needs of the task at hand.

This would tend to imply that the way in which we measure fear is relative to our personal history, rather than absolute, while our reactions are absolute.