keep calm & carry on
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A Q&A with Sian BielockTRANSCRIPT
For any of us who have ever
blanked on a math test after
days of studying, or wracked
our minds for hours looking
for the perfect final sentence
for a paper, Sian Beilock has a suggestion:
Don’t over think it. An associate professor
in the Department of Psychology, Beilock
made a name for herself investigating the
impact of stress on human performance.
Beilock and her team found that skilled
athletes largely run on auto-pilot, but when
they over-analyze that next free throw or
putt, they’re more likely to cave to pres-
sure. Singing to themselves, among other
tricks, helps athletes keep their cool, she
found.
Beilock's research has shown that clutch
performances and agonizing chokes aren’t
limited to places like the United Center or
Wrigley Field. For every Michael Jordan
at Madison Square Garden or Jean Van
de Velde at golf ’s Open Championship,
Beilock says there are countless other, more
mundane moments when people succeed or
fail based on the same kind of pressure and
mental presence. For a closer look at the
psychology of choking and the business of
helping people keep their cool, Grey Citycaught up with Beilock last month in her
Green Hall laboratory.
GREY CITY: You write about famous ath-
letes like Shaquille O’Neal, Sam Snead, and
Maria Sharapova throwing away big leads.
Have you talked to any of them since your
book, Choke, was published?
SIAN BEILOCK: There are a few athletes in
the book whose sports psychologists—the
people who work one-on-one with them—
have said “I really want to give your book
to them, but can I cut out that page?” I can’t
name names, but definitely a lot of the ath-
letes in the book know about it. I often talk
to coaches, Olympic coaches, or coaches
of professional athletes and I think they’re
really interested in this idea that there are
simple psychological tools we can use to
produce our best performances.
GC: Do you get calls or e-mails from non-
athletes looking for help about choking?
SB: I’ve had some interesting ones about
people who are artists or painters who
feel like they get up to the canvas and
can’t paint or write. [When] we talk about
choking under pressure, we think of these
canonical situations, like the Olympics
or the job interview, but there are activi-
ties that we do on a daily basis that we
can perform poorly on when under stress.
Whether it’s being a writer and not being
able to write, or parallel parking in front of
your spouse, or giving a toast at a wedding,
or ending up in the elevator for two min-
utes with your boss and trying not to look
like a fool, there’s all these situations that,
although they’re not for a gold medal, can
really show some of the same characteris-
tics of flubs under pressure.
GC: What’s your all-time favorite choke?
SB: I think one that always stands out for
me is Sarah Palin’s Katie Couric interview. I
think that is really a great example of where
she just hadn’t practiced. It was rumored
that she hadn’t let the handlers quiz her
and get her ready. That’s just in such con-
trast to someone like Obama, in terms of
how he handles giving speeches or ques-
tions from reporters, he spends a lot of time
practicing.
I did a TV show the other day where
I had to read off of a teleprompter and
it’s actually really hard. It’s been reported
that Obama spends lots of time reading
off teleprompters and practicing such that
he seems very fluent in these sorts of situ-
ations. It struck me that it was a skill that
needed to be acquired.
GC: In your book you write about giving
talks to business leaders. How do your
psychological methods mesh with their
corporate attitudes?
SB: I think a lot of what I recommend is
counter-intuitive, but it’s simple, so it’s
appealing. Whether it’s writing about your
worries, or realizing that in putting groups
of people together everyone shouldn’t have
the same expertise—we know that two heads
with different sorts of backgrounds are bet-
ter than one—or realizing that even though
you have a lot of knowledge, you may not
be able to predict how a consumer who’s
never seen your product will handle it.
I think that a lot of this is stuff they
hadn’t thought about before, and the idea
that you can give them some facts and ways
to ensure better performance is enticing to
them. Especially some of the techniques
where it’s training under stress for an emer-
gency situation, or getting ready for a pre-
sentation, people have told me that these
techniques are really effective in terms of
whatever they’re trying to accomplish.
I had an executive tell me about an
anthrax scare at his company and how
even though they had gone over drills and
procedures, when it actually happened, no
one performed the way they were supposed
to. From that [I realized] they had actually
practiced, [but] had just talked about it.
Actually practicing what you might do in
a do-or-die situation and upping the ante a
bit is an important part. Since then, they’ve
implemented those actual drills.
GC: You were a competitive lacrosse player
before becoming an academic. Did you ever
choke on the field or at a desk?
SB: I never took tests in the real situation
as well as I did in practice tests, whether
it was the SAT or the GRE. And there
are definitely performances in the ath-
letic world where I never played as well as
I could have in front of Olympic coaches
or college recruiters, so I think I’ve always
been keenly aware that subtle environmen-
tal conditions can change your ability to
show what you know or how you play.
G C: W h a t w a s y o u r i m p r e s s i o n o f
Christina Aguilera’s version of the “Star-
Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl?
SB: I mean, it was obvious that she had
messed up the words, but she kept on going
very fluidly, which I think speaks to the fact
that she’s a very practiced performer.
That’s an example that I’d liken to when
Chief Justice Roberts swore in Obama and
he messed up. This is something that’s so
well practiced, and you get in front of all
these people and you just pay a little too
much attention to what you’re saying, and
all of a sudden it seems to go out the win-
dow.
GC: With your heightened knowledge
about choking, how do you deal with the
phenomenon in your own classroom?
SB: I try and have multiple tests so that
everything isn’t riding on one performance.
And I talk to my students about some of
the tips I talk about in the book as a way to
study and get ready. So this idea that if you
just read over your notes, you might not
have a good idea of what you’re going to be
able to show on a test, but actually getting
together in a study group and testing each
other, getting used to some of those stress-
ful situations, that also helps you under-
stand what you do and don’t know. I try to
get them ready in that way.
GC: How do you think the curve of stan-
dardized tests is thrown by instances of
choking?
SB: We know that a lot of these tests don’t
have great predictive validity, so the SAT,
for example, and the GRE don’t predict
performance much past first quarter grades.
And one of the reasons I think this is the
case is because you don’t always get a good
metric of what students know or their abili-
ties from these tests because factors like the
situation are impacting some students and
not others. So in the book I talk about this
idea that those students with the most gen-
eral intellectual abilities—the most cognitive
horsepower, which is one of the building
blocks of IQ—tend to be the most likely
to choke. And what you have is a testing
situation where you’re truncating the distri-
bution such that those people who should
be performing at the top are performing
lower.
I think this research highlights the dan-
gers of relying too heavily on these scores
as predictors of future success. This is
especially true if you think about minority
groups or women in the math and sciences.
A lot of the work I talk about in the book
suggests that people can perform below
their potential because they’re just aware
of stereotypes of how they should perform,
because of their ethnic group or their gen-
der group.
What this suggests to me is that if we
have these groups systematically perform-
ing below their potential, we’re missing
potential segments of the population that
might be earmarked to go on and succeed
in future activities.
GC: How has your research weighed in on
your ideas about parenting, now that you’re
expecting?
SB: Well, it’s a girl, and there’s a whole
chapter in there about gender differences in
performance, so I’m very acutely aware of
these sorts of things. I think that one thing
that the book hopefully gets across is that
a lot of the differences we see later on in
terms of selection into math and sciences
and things like that can be traced back to
exposure and experiences early on. I’m a
big proponent of having Legos and puzzles
for girls as well as boys. I guess I was raised
pretty gender-neutral, so I’ll probably do
the same.
I don’t think I have a philosophy yet;
everyone asks me what my child-rearing
philosophy is, and I’m sometimes stressed
out that I don’t have one. [Laughs.]
GC: One of the t ips in your book to
improve performance is to write about your
anxieties for 10-15 minutes before a big
test. Have you written down your anxieties
about parenting?
SB: It hasn’t gotten to that point yet! I
guess I’ve become more aware of the fact
that kids are really influenced by their
teachers, by their parents, by the stresses
around them, and a lot of academic situa-
tions in this day and age are pressure cook-
ers, especially early on. So I would want to
ensure that emphasis gets placed on learn-
ing and knowledge rather than just perfor-
mance on a test.
—Christina Pillsbury
KEEP CALM& CARRY ON
A Q&A with Sian BeilockDARREN LEOW/GREY CITY
8 CHICAGO MAROON | GREY CITY | March 8, 2011