I don't fully agree with the article. As someone who has gamed in front of many audiences before, it can absolutely make you screw up. Specifically when it mentions performing well in front of an audience acting as sort of a mental stimulant for reward. I think it also depends heavily on where the audience is. If I'm in say a room with just my team and sound proof headphones, you are way more focused and play more like you normally would. If someone is standing over your shoulder, you start to do things you wouldn't normally do, whether it be to speed up the match to not bore the observer, to try an hit a cool shot, etc. The nature of the action being done has to be one of the most influential factors. In a gaming environment where no two matches are ever the same, you can't go off of rehearsed actions because they won't work in all scenarios. Therefor, when in new situations where you're trying to adapt on the fly, that's when you start trying to get fancy for the audience and ultimately make sloppy mistakes. However, if it were something that you can use rehearsed actions on, like coding, then the pressure might not be as intense as to make you mess up.
When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
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Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#32The research on this is not new, and it’s not as simple as this. If you give people a task that’s well-rehearsed for them, that they’re good at, they’ll tend to do better. But if you give them something less well-rehearsed, something that’s “hard,” they do worse. I wish I had my psychology textbooks on hand for the references, but a lot of this stuff isn’t obvious until after-the-fact.
The full name is the "Yerkes-Dodson Law of Social Facilitation." It's this idea that a task requires an optimal amount of nervous system arousal. Too much and you get jittery, too little and you get lethargic. So it looks like an inverted U with the optimal performance at a middle level of arousal.
Although you're right it's more complicated. If you're an expert at a task, then you do better if you have increased arousal. This is because stress hormones cause new synaptic production to slow down and old networks/circuits to increase in their conduction/strength. So if you're an NBA player, and it's the playoffs, you're going to be better than normal - because you're an expert at the task.
If however the task is 'complex' (like, say, software development) then if you put pressure on people (or if they're putting pressure on themselves), the performance falls significantly. I forgot the name of the study, but this was shown cross-culturally. They gave poor Indian men (in India) 3-months salary to solve a decently straight forward lateral thinking puzzle. The men who got paid performed way worse, then the other men who weren't paid at all.
Sometimes that strikes me as oddly familiar. Paying someone to do something they love and putting too much pressure on them makes their performance degrade.
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#33Possibly related: when you have difficulty being self-motivated.
When you have a deadline, at which time someone will look over your work, it's similar to having an audience.
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#34The research on this is not new, and it’s not as simple as this. If you give people a task that’s well-rehearsed for them, that they’re good at, they’ll tend to do better. But if you give them something less well-rehearsed, something that’s “hard,” they do worse. I wish I had my psychology textbooks on hand for the references, but a lot of this stuff isn’t obvious until after-the-fact.
Is it that simple? It certainly does not fit my experience. I type code for a living and have for 30 years so I'm clearly well rehearsed but I can't type well when being looked at.
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#35The research on this is not new, and it’s not as simple as this. If you give people a task that’s well-rehearsed for them, that they’re good at, they’ll tend to do better. But if you give them something less well-rehearsed, something that’s “hard,” they do worse. I wish I had my psychology textbooks on hand for the references, but a lot of this stuff isn’t obvious until after-the-fact.
Is it that simple? It certainly does not fit my experience. I type code for a living and have for 30 years so I'm clearly well rehearsed but I can't type well when being looked at.
This is psychology, there are always exceptions. Personally I don't have problems with the act of typing when being looked at, but I do have a tendency to get nervous to the point I'm having trouble speaking. Only happens with crowds I'm not familiar with though. But I know enough of sociolog/psychology to realize that doesn't mean any of the claims made here are false for the general public, or even for me in certain situations. I do have the impressions I'm sometimes better in sports when people are watching and/or cheering.
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#36The research on this is not new, and it’s not as simple as this. If you give people a task that’s well-rehearsed for them, that they’re good at, they’ll tend to do better. But if you give them something less well-rehearsed, something that’s “hard,” they do worse. I wish I had my psychology textbooks on hand for the references, but a lot of this stuff isn’t obvious until after-the-fact.
Is it that simple? It certainly does not fit my experience. I type code for a living and have for 30 years so I'm clearly well rehearsed but I can't type well when being looked at.
Perhaps that is not a performance, in the same sense as other stuff. e.g. do you get a bit of adrenaline kick in, are you motivated to impress them with your keyboard skills, etc?
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#37It may still take time for people's notion of performance to gravitate to literal creative energy and to how the audience contributes and co-creates anything on a stage. In pragmatic artistic theories it's an obvious fact and art impossible without this idea.
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#38Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect from the early 1930s
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#39I wonder, could this apply to open source? Do we build better code if it's open source because it has more of an audience?
With exception of few large projects, you can be fairly sure no one will look at your code. And in a work, people you do know are pretty much guaranteed to look at your code, one way or the other.
This might however be argument for code review.
Re: When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
#40I don't fully agree with the article. As someone who has gamed in front of many audiences before, it can absolutely make you screw up. Specifically when it mentions performing well in front of an audience acting as sort of a mental stimulant for reward. I think it also depends heavily on where the audience is. If I'm in say a room with just my team and sound proof headphones, you are way more focused and play more li…
> In a gaming environment where no two matches are ever the same, you can't go off of rehearsed actions because they won't work in all scenarios.
Even with routine muscle-memory tasks like combos in fighting games, "tournament nerves" are blamed for errors.