Maybe we need less incentive to perform well

OPINION: You would like to improve someone's performance, maybe your own. It could be performance at work. It could be sport. It could be your child's schoolwork. You might give the person an incentive to perform better. Extra money perhaps. Is this a good idea? Will it really lead to improvement? Well, the answer is not simple. It depends.

Firstly, it depends on what the person requires to perform the task better. If the reason for the poor performance is that the person doesn't know how to do the task properly or hasn't had enough training and practice, then simply offering to give them a reward for doing it better isn't going to help. If the reason is that the person is not much motivated to do the task well, then offering them a reward may well help.

The reward may motivate them to put in more effort and this often does produce a better performance.

But not always. One of the oldest results in psychology goes by the name of the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The idea is that higher levels of motivation lead to better performance up to a point, but after that point having an even higher level of motivation leads to performance dropping off again. So being more motivated is not always better. Sometimes it pays to ease off the pressure.

The mixed effect of motivation on performance can be most easily seen in sport. We often say that players and teams can choke. A typical choking situation is that a team that has been playing well in ordinary competition gets to a final or semi-final and then loses to a team they were expected to beat. This is easily explained by the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The team was too highly motivated. In games like cricket, rugby or tennis, where people or teams compete directly, it is not always possible to tell if choking was responsible.

It may be that your team played worse than usual, or it may be that the other team played better. Is a batting collapse in cricket the result of the batting team playing poorly or the bowling and fielding team playing exceptionally well?

Bouke Teeselink and some colleagues at the University of Amsterdam studied choking in darts. Although you compete against another player in darts, you don't compete directly. When the other player finishes his (or her) turn, he doesn't try to oppose your own throw. So if you throw more inaccurately than normal in darts, it can only be because your game has got worse, not because your opponent is doing something better.

Over more than 100,000 darts matches Teeselink found that darts players threw worse in tight situations. Tight situations were when winning or losing came down to the last throw. They often choked. The amount of choking depended on the player.

Amateur and young players tended to choke more. Professionals choked less. Presumably the professionals had learnt more about how to deal with tight situations. However, they did still choke.

Choking is something we associate with sports and good players and one of the jobs of a coach is try to work out ways to deal with it. But the problem of being too highly motivated is not just one for sport. There are lots of other examples around.

You are being interviewed for a job you really want to get. You are sitting an important examination. You are concentrating on a really important presentation. Perhaps you don't need someone to offer you more of an incentive. Perhaps you need less. Or perhaps you need the help of a good sports coach.

Dr Simon Kemp is a professor of psychology at the University of Canterbury.

Source: Stuff.co.nz

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