I was very interested to read your views on why humans choke. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to a question posed by a professor. What I came up with at the time was that choking is caused by sympathetic fight or flight response (adaptive in less cognitively complex organisms but not in our human world where finesse is necessary). In other words, I was suggesting it is a misfire that is so deeply rooted in our mental architecture we haven’t managed to evolve out of it yet. Also, I wonder, are there examples of non-human animals “choking”?
Edit: I meant “choking” in the sense of failing during high pressure situations. I was referring to Robin Hanson’s second link ( to an OB post). Sorry for any confusion.
There is evidence of something similar to choking among other species, including rats and cockroaches. Social psychologists have found that the presence of others tends to make people do better on easy or well-practiced and worse on difficult, complex tasks, and these effects have been found among cockroaches running through easy or difficult mazes. They call this effect social facilitation.
Rats and cockroaches are pretty social creatures; so should we interpret this as evidence for Hanson’s status theory of choking, that it’s to avoid appearing to the elites to be dangerously competent?
Is competence dangerous for rats and cockroaches? My guess is that there is no cost to a cockroach for being seen by other cockroaches to have run a maze quickly. If that guess is correct, then that study in isolation is a piece of evidence against Hanson’s status theory of choking.
And, more directly, the study is evidence for the optimal level of arousal / social facilitation theory of choking. For each task, there is an optimal level of physiological arousal—increasing arousal improves performance up to that point, and then hinders performance if it increases beyond that level. Easy or well-learned tasks tend to have a higher optimal level of arousal than difficult tasks. Some situations (such as the presence of others) increase arousal, which can lead to failure if arousal gets too high (“choking”).
If you want an evolutionary story, I would posit that our ancestors evolved to process certain circumstances as cues to increase their level of arousal, in a way that would tend to put them close to the optimal level of arousal for each situation. But individuals in the ancestral environment encountered different sorts of situations and engaged in different tasks than people today. Compared to the ancestral environment, many modern high-pressure situations involve behaviors that are more complicated and less physically demanding, which means that lower levels of arousal are optimal, and this mismatch leads to excessive arousal and choking.
Is competence dangerous for rats and cockroaches? My guess is that there is no cost to a cockroach for being seen by other cockroaches to have run a maze quickly.
It is dangerous to the extent that No Free Lunch applies.
The structural modifications to the human throat that permit easy speech make us vulnerable to choking. If I recall correctly, most animals can breathe and swallow at the same time. Human infants are also capable of this. But the larynx slowly shifts so that we can modulate our airflow in sophisticated ways, and one consequence of this is that swallowing is no longer safely compatible with simultaneous breathing.
Voted up from −1 because this plausibly is just an honest misunderstanding.
Though Annoyance, you should keep it in mind whenever you’re tempted to interpret someone’s remarks in a way that seems surprising / non-sequitury… I guess to you the world just seems like an endless stream of people saying crazy things, and so you can’t distinguish your own misunderstandings of them within that.
As for alternative kinds of ‘choking’: regarding animals, see the concept of a “’coon trap”, sometimes called a “monkey trap”. It’s a specific example of flight-or-fight leading directly to a maladaptive response.
In an inverse of the situation with literal choking, young humans are also vulnerable to it, but adults (usually) aren’t.
I was very interested to read your views on why humans choke. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to a question posed by a professor. What I came up with at the time was that choking is caused by sympathetic fight or flight response (adaptive in less cognitively complex organisms but not in our human world where finesse is necessary). In other words, I was suggesting it is a misfire that is so deeply rooted in our mental architecture we haven’t managed to evolve out of it yet. Also, I wonder, are there examples of non-human animals “choking”?
Edit: I meant “choking” in the sense of failing during high pressure situations. I was referring to Robin Hanson’s second link ( to an OB post). Sorry for any confusion.
There is evidence of something similar to choking among other species, including rats and cockroaches. Social psychologists have found that the presence of others tends to make people do better on easy or well-practiced and worse on difficult, complex tasks, and these effects have been found among cockroaches running through easy or difficult mazes. They call this effect social facilitation.
Rats and cockroaches are pretty social creatures; so should we interpret this as evidence for Hanson’s status theory of choking, that it’s to avoid appearing to the elites to be dangerously competent?
Is competence dangerous for rats and cockroaches? My guess is that there is no cost to a cockroach for being seen by other cockroaches to have run a maze quickly. If that guess is correct, then that study in isolation is a piece of evidence against Hanson’s status theory of choking.
And, more directly, the study is evidence for the optimal level of arousal / social facilitation theory of choking. For each task, there is an optimal level of physiological arousal—increasing arousal improves performance up to that point, and then hinders performance if it increases beyond that level. Easy or well-learned tasks tend to have a higher optimal level of arousal than difficult tasks. Some situations (such as the presence of others) increase arousal, which can lead to failure if arousal gets too high (“choking”).
If you want an evolutionary story, I would posit that our ancestors evolved to process certain circumstances as cues to increase their level of arousal, in a way that would tend to put them close to the optimal level of arousal for each situation. But individuals in the ancestral environment encountered different sorts of situations and engaged in different tasks than people today. Compared to the ancestral environment, many modern high-pressure situations involve behaviors that are more complicated and less physically demanding, which means that lower levels of arousal are optimal, and this mismatch leads to excessive arousal and choking.
It is dangerous to the extent that No Free Lunch applies.
The structural modifications to the human throat that permit easy speech make us vulnerable to choking. If I recall correctly, most animals can breathe and swallow at the same time. Human infants are also capable of this. But the larynx slowly shifts so that we can modulate our airflow in sophisticated ways, and one consequence of this is that swallowing is no longer safely compatible with simultaneous breathing.
Voted up from −1 because this plausibly is just an honest misunderstanding.
Though Annoyance, you should keep it in mind whenever you’re tempted to interpret someone’s remarks in a way that seems surprising / non-sequitury… I guess to you the world just seems like an endless stream of people saying crazy things, and so you can’t distinguish your own misunderstandings of them within that.
As for alternative kinds of ‘choking’: regarding animals, see the concept of a “’coon trap”, sometimes called a “monkey trap”. It’s a specific example of flight-or-fight leading directly to a maladaptive response.
In an inverse of the situation with literal choking, young humans are also vulnerable to it, but adults (usually) aren’t.