Here is a nice essay on the idea that “over thinking” causes choking. It begins with this study:
A classic study by Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler is frequently cited in support of the notion that experts, when performing at their best, act intuitively and automatically and don’t think about what they are doing as they are doing it, but just do it. The study divided subjects, who were college students, into two groups. In both groups, participants were asked to rank five brands of jam from best to worst. In one group they were asked to also explain their reasons for their rankings. The group whose sole task was to rank the jams ended up with fairly consistent judgments both among themselves and in comparison with the judgments of expert food tasters, as recorded in Consumer Reports. The rankings of the other group, however, went haywire, with subjects’ preferences neither in line with one another’s nor in line with the preferences of the experts. Why should this be? The researchers posit that when subjects explained their choices, they thought more about them.
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October 13, 2013 at 11:01 pm
Overthinking | Cheap Talk
[…] There are experiments that seem to confirm the idea that too much thinking harms performance. But here’s a model in which thinking always improves performance and which is still consistent with the empirical observation that thinking is negatively correlated with performance. […]
October 17, 2014 at 7:10 pm
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