Choking under pressure in front of a supportive audience: Evidence from professional biathlon

Incentives, Performance and Choking in Darts

“…The prediction that athletes perform better under higher monetary incentives has been confirmed for various sports, including golf (Ehrenberg and Bognanno, 1990a,b), auto racing (Becker and Huselid, 1992), horse racing (Lynch, 2005), and tennis (Gilsdorf and Sukhatme, 2008a,b). Choking under pressure has previously been observed in, for example, penalty shootouts in soccer (Dohmen, 2008), free throws in basketball (Cao et al, 2011;Goldman and Rao, 2012;Toma, 2017;Böheim et al, 2018), putting in golf (Hickman and Metz, 2015), shooting in biathlon (Lindner, 2017;Harb-Wu and Krumer, 2019), and tennis (Paserman, 2010;Cohen-Zada et al, 2017).…”

Incentives, performance and choking in darts

“…The prediction that athletes perform better under higher monetary incentives has been confirmed for various sports, including golf ( Ehrenberg and Bognanno, 1990a,b ), auto racing ( Becker and Huselid, 1992 ), horse racing ( Lynch, 2005 ), and tennis ( Gilsdorf and Sukhatme, 2008a,b ). Choking under pressure has previously been observed in, for example, penalty shootouts in soccer ( Dohmen, 2008 ), free throws in basketball ( Böheim et al, 2018;Cao et al, 2011;Goldman and Rao, 2012;Toma, 2017 ), putting in golf ( Hickman and Metz, 2015 ), shooting in biathlon ( Harb-Wu and Krumer, 2019;Lindner, 2017 ), and tennis ( Cohen-Zada et al, 2017;Paserman, 2010 ).…”

Does the size of rewards influence performance in cognitively demanding tasks?

“…Yet, a range of studies from the world of sports repeatedly indicate that large reward differences, tend to lead to high stakes reducing performance [9][10][11][12][13]. This discrepancy between sports and cognitive tasks in the lab might simply be the difference between a randomized, controlled trial and observational studies, which cannot exclude potentially confounding factors, such as the public scrutiny and the status competition that sports events also imply.…”

“…Data from sports events involving high stakes allows an examination of the impact of higher stakes on performance in real life scenarios. Studies ranging from basketball [ 9 , 10 ], tennis [ 11 ], biathlon [ 12 ] to golf [ 13 ] find that higher stakes generally reduces performance of the participant. More specifically, in golf the effect leads to golfers putting worse when more money is at stake [ 13 ], while higher stakes implied diminished quality of basketball free throws in games compared to training [ 10 ] as well as worse free throws in crucial parts of the game [ 9 ].…”