Smart People Choke Under Pressure
 

The rest of the article is here.

Personally, I'm great at dealing with things I understand when I'm under pressure. I always get praise at work for being able to deal with things like server outages effectively and without freaking out. Recently I was driving my sister's car when the throttle jammed wide-open on a fairly busy road. After a few unsuccessful jabs at the gas pedal I pushed the clutch in, killed the engine, drifted into a parking lot, unstuck the cable, and got on with things. Didn't even raise my pulse.

But when it comes to stuff like multitasking, managing people, working out a complicated schedule (Bubba will be over to paint my house at 2:00, then I have to meet so-and-so at 2:30, OH SHIT there's that conference call at 2 also, better do that while I'm in the car, gotta be back at the office at 3.....you get the idea), trying to get a hold of a business associate who never answers their goddamn phone, etc., I get really pissed off and flip out. I know plenty of people who actually enjoy those kinds of situations. Funny thing is they're generally the ones to get all worked up when a problem comes up that I have no problem at all with.

Anyway, I'd say that how you deal with pressure is more correlated to how well you understand the situation, rather than short term memory like the article says. What are your thoughts?

Hmm.. Personally, I very rarely flip out over anything. My IQ is over 140, and I'd like to think that I'm fairly blessed with a higher than average amount of common sense as well.

I think that the amount of stress and a person's reaction to it is a combination of what you've said and the amount of pressure and expectations you have of yourself. I'm a little like you about things like my car, or everyday snafus that I have to deal with that are within my expertise. Other things, like scheduling issues, I sometimes have more of a tendency to get a little stressed over, simply because I know that being places on time is a weakness for me... Its pretty normal for me to get engrossed in something and not notice the time. Things with my dogs, especially things I have no control over like my male's epilepsy, tend to make my heart beat a little faster. And things like my limitations due to my health issues (I have arthritis, among other things) seriously piss me off when I'm not able to do something because of it... I don't like being limited when I know I'd be perfectly capable otherwise.

I think everyone's stress triggers are different... It might be that a smarter person knows more clearly what they are capable of and any situation that falls short is more easily seen.

I too think that the study doesn't make sense. If you have a person with "high working-memory capacity" and a person with "low working-memory capacity" and they both have stressful thoughts that occupy some memory space, then the "high working-memory capacity" person still has more memory space than the "low working-memory capacity" person.

I suppose it might make sense if high people actually experience more stress than low people, but the article doesn't make that claim.

As a functioning stupid person I must say that I experience a lot of stress in unfamilliar situations so I don't know if such a claim is accurate.

wisdom of the study aside...it's about letting that which does not matter truely slide.

sorta sarcastic...but there are too damn many things in life to worry about properly. pick a few that you care about, and try to stick to that.

people with higher intelligence are not people that just know alot of things, they are people who can adapt, improvise, and overcome. Thinking outside the box is what causes people to excel, not getting the right answers all the time on a piece of paper, so its no surprise to me that this study says what it says. Does that mean we crack under pressure? hell no, it only means that we're better at overcoming adversity with diversity.

Our salutatorian in high school received a scholarship to Cornell University. First year GPA: .67. Apparently this person was too used to being coddled, and the university environment was too much. I believe this person dropped out. I know nothing else about their life, so maybe they bounced back.

I call bullshit. I mean, I'm a god-dammed genius and I love pressure. :thumbsup:

Weird. Then again, as soon as you start doubting yourself it can spiral out of control. But I think the ability to handle stressful situations depends on a lot more than your ability to perform long divisions in your head. Experience, self-confidence, blood sugar level all matters.

Another interpritation is, people with lots of working memory excell when allowed to work with no constraints.

They didn't detect an inversion: the 'dumber' people didn't do better than the 'smarter' people under constraints. Rather, the 'smarter' people did better compared to the 'dumber' people when there where no constraints.

(where 'smarter' = high capacity memory and 'dumber' = low capacity memory)

It also depends on your personality, and your environment. This study seems to have left out too many variables.

For example, when I showed off my self-taught programming prowess to my drafting teacher in high school, I turned super red and got all embarrassed when he called in another teacher so he could see that I had written a simple prog that would fix something in an application he uses. Also, I taught myself a bit of guitar. I learned how to play Recuerdos de la Alhambra pretty well, and the intro to Yngwie Malmsteen's "Disciples of Hell". I always played them quite well, and my dad wanted my uncle to see. But when I played in front of my uncle I completely screwed up all over the place and I think I made myself look unskilled. However, this study may not really apply to me, because my short-term memory (also known as working memory) sucks. My long-term memory, however, is better than anyone else's that I know of, except my dad's.

One of my prof's is known for having difficult, high-pressure tests. Every student is either warned about it before they get into his class or rapidly figure it out come test time. He also happens to have a public blog. Once, he blogged about his tests. He wondered if "high-pressure tests" are more of a test of a person's ability to handle pressure, than how well a person knows the content of the test. He may very well be giving out better grades to the people who can handle pressure than the people who know the material better but do poorly because they are stressed about the test.

I feel like I can handle tests under pressure much better if I am confident in the subject. If I don't have complete understanding of the topic, I start to get really nervous, though.

I am decently intellegent and have a great working memory. I recently took an i.q. test that i was nervous for and found the article to be true for that case. i found that situations with the test for which i had to cram info into my head when i got a little worried it would slip away. One thing was she would read out numbers and i had to repeat them back. This goes up to nine numbers backwards. when you are trying to hold on to those digits the words "fuck i hope i get this" or "thats a nice picture" can cause you to lose a couple numbers and its tough as hell to get them back. the first time i did this i was nervous and i still stayed in the 95th percentile for this exersice. On a retest i was more calm and confident and i got all of the numbers right. Maybe the article goes by the idea that if you can store more in your working memory then you have the ability to lose more, not that smart people always crack under pressure.

i think you are comparing stress levels, not the way a person handles stress. the better you understand (or feel familiar with) a situation, the less likely it is to cause stress. if the situation in question isn't stressful to an individual, how they handle the situation doesn't reflect how they would handle it if they were stressed. that make sense?

i tend to work better under pressure because it motivates me. if there's no pressure to get a task done, it may be a while before i get around to it. and i wasn't the type to get stressed over tests in school, my idea of studying was to review my notes on my way to class. i figured i either knew the material or i didn't, working myself into a frenzy wasn't going to help.

but i do notice that when i'm stressed and am trying to remember something, particularly something simple, it's very difficult. i do this all the time with phone numbers. things are a little crazy and i keep telling myself to remember the number--even repeating it over and over, and by the time i get to the phone i've forgotten it.

i don't know how accurate this study is though, they give you a basic review in the article but there are no details on how they evaluated memory or stress levels. the stressful situation they provided doesn't sound very stressful to me, but perhaps i'd fall into the low working memory category.