Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

Box 3.5 Thinking critically about...explanations of choking behaviour

in athletes

At first glance, choking in sport can be explained by attributing it to a nervous personality
disposition. But as we learned in Chapter 2, trait explanations of behaviour are rather
dubious. Logically, traits are inferences from, rather than causes of, behaviour. Therefore,
there is always a danger of circularity when “explaining” behaviour using traits (e.g.,
“she acted nervously because she is an anxious person”). Instead of explaining choking in
terms of anxiety-proneness, modern sport psychology researchers tend to consider it as an
attentional problem. Specifically, it seems to be caused by focusing on oneself when one
should be concentrating on the task at hand. To illustrate this approach, consider the
research of Roy Baumeister in this field (see Azar, 1996, p. 21), To begin with,
Baumeister (1984) began by distinguishing between sports that are dominated primarily
by skill (e.g., golf, gymnastics) and those which require sustained effort (e,g,, running,
weightlifting), According to him, the pressure of a competition can facilitate performance
of an “effortful” skill but cm impede the performance of a precision skill This theory was
tested using simulated pressure situations in laboratory conditions. For example,
Baumeister devised an effortful task by timing the speed and accuracy with which college
students could arrange a deck of cards in numerical order. However, he introduced a
pressure component into this task by telling the respondents that if they did better than
their previous score, he would pay them $5. In general, results showed an improvement
in sport performance in the pressure group. But when Baumeister used a skilful task (e.g.,
playing a videogame), different findings emerged. Thus Baumeister suggested that
although pressure from competition or from public scrutiny makes people try harder on
effortful tasks, it does not make them perform better on skill-based tasks. This happens
because pressure tends to make people pay attention to automatic (i.e., highly practised)
aspects of a given task. But here the picture becomes more complex. To explain,
Baumeister proposes that athletes who are

used to focusing on themselves choke less frequently than do counterparts who engage in
less self-focused observation. In other words, pressure does not alter the chronic self-
focus achieved by some people—but it does affect the behaviour of people who do not
normally concentrate on their own actions.

Critical thinking questions
Can you think of any alternative explanation of Baumeister’s results? Do you agree
with him that excessive self-awareness is the main cause of choking in athletes? Why do
you think choking is more prevalent in untimed individual sports rather than timed group
sports?

In summary, we have learned that choking under pressure is a pervasive problem in sport.
Unfortunately, no consensus has been reached as yet about the theoretical mechanisms
that cause it. Nevertheless, most theories of this phenomenon agree that anxiety impairs
performance by inducing the athlete to think too much, thereby regressing to an earlier

Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 88