Are You Choking Under Pressure?

Find out about the surprising link between choking under pressure and memory.

No matter how individualistic someone may seem, no one is uninfluenced by others. How we behave depends not only on who we are but also upon which social environment we find ourselves in. When others are mentally or physically close to us, they exert certain demands, expectations, judgments, and examples on us — whether real or imagined by us. That is what we call social pressure. A special form of social pressure is what any of us has experienced and think back to with great dread — choking under pressure.

Even though it doesn’t sound like it, social pressure can be a good thing — just like stereotypes or prejudice — since it helps create predictable and orderly social interactions. Social pressure turns sour when it makes us behave stupidly or even morally wrong.

Social facilitation and social interference

A very minimal form of social pressure is having people watch you while you perform tasks. Sometimes people observing us improves our performance and then it’s called social facilitation. When people watching us deteriorates our performance, it’s called social interference.