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gwern's avatar

This sort of choking might explain stereotype threats; eg. http://www.salon.com/2012/0...

> Even perceptions of race, caste, and gender identities can have significant effects on productivity. In a brilliant set of experiments in India, low- and high-caste children were asked to solve puzzles, with monetary rewards for success. When they were asked to do so anonymously, there was no caste difference in performance. But when the low caste and high caste were in a mixed group where the low-caste individuals were known to be low caste (they knew it, and they knew that others knew it), low-caste performance was much lower than that of the high caste. The experiment highlighted the importance of social perceptions: low-caste individuals somehow absorbed into their own reality the belief that lower-caste individuals were inferior—but only so in the presence of those who held that belief.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

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.

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