Very Highly Skilled Individuals Do Not Choke Under Pressure: Evidence from Professional Darts

Abstract

Understanding and predicting how individuals perform in high-pressure situations is of importance in designing and managing workplaces, but also in other areas of society such as disaster management or professional sports. For simple effort tasks, an increase in the pressure experienced by an individual, e.g. due to incentive schemes in a workplace, will increase the effort put into the task and hence in most cases also the performance. However, for skill tasks, there exists a substantial body of literature that fairly consistently reports a choking phenomenon, where individuals exposed to pressure do in fact perform worse than in non-pressure situations. However, we argue that many of the corresponding studies have crucial limitations, such as neglected interaction effects or insufficient numbers of observations to allow within-individual analysis. We also diagnose some degree of confusion in the literature regarding the differentiation between skill and effort tasks, which, assuming the choking phenomenon in case of skill tasks to be real, would in fact be assumed to be orthogonally impacted by pressure. Focusing on the more complex and usually harder to capture case of skill tasks, here we investigate performance under pressure in professional darts as a near-ideal setting with no direct interaction between players and a high number of observations per subject. We analyze almost one year of tournament data covering 23,192 dart throws, hence a data set that is very much larger than those used in most previous studies. We find strong evidence for an overall improved performance under pressure, for nearly all 83 players in the sample. Contrary to what would be expected given the evidence in favor of a choking phenomenon, we hence find that professional darts players excel at performing skill tasks under high pressure. These results could have important consequences for our understanding of how highly skilled individuals deal with high-pressure situations.

Could Prosthesis Use Provide a Competitive Advantage in Darts?

“…It appears logical that a shorter throwing distance is conducive to better throwing accuracy, especially after a player has become accustomed to the new distance and tuned his or her throwing mechanics accordingly. Due to time constraints, the latter process was probably not completed during this study, and it may be assumed that the observed benefits would become more pronounced with practice [7,8]. Additional research is needed to investigate this aspect, as well as other factors in addition to throwing reach that may affect accuracy, such as laterality (i.e., left/right-handedness), stance stability and proprioception.…”