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.
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.