I prefer the original article at the The Observer. It describes how you can focus (or refocus when you are already in a self-councious state).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/jul/26/sports-psycholog...

Thank you for posting this related link. I remember reading it a while back and wanted to find it, but it was not in my notes anywhere.

This could have a completely rational explanation: If you find yourself overmatched, then it pays to take risks.

If I found myself playing golf against Tiger Woods, I'd try higher risk / higher reward shots, because if I stick to my typical game I'm surely going to lose. This would make my score worse on average, but who cares about that when once in a while the bet pays off and I win?

That makes some sense, but not quite.

In golf, there are prizes for getting 2nd, 3rd, etc... So if you knew Woods was going to destroy you, you would still play your best game and try to get 2nd place.

Now, for the people who might get 2nd, 3rd, and maybe a few more top spots, they might want to try to best Woods. But people who have no chance would still play their regular game (if your theory is correct).

So I'd be interested to see if the drop in score correlated at all with the average score across previous games.

Indeed. This part constitutes the science: "When the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes." The rest is speculation.

In fact, even that phrasing is slightly misleading, because it suggests causality -- I suspect the evidence only supports correlation.

The article is a particularly idiotic example of uninformed speculation passing for science journalism.

That does make sense, but the article is saying that people screwed up because they overthought their current strategies and played worse than normally, not because they overcorrected in the other direction and took more risks.

The only facts quoted in the article are: Tiger woods in dominant, and "[w]hen the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even more pronounced when Woods was playing well."

Based solely on the above they draw their conclusions. I'm just pointing out that there is a simpler and more rational conclusion one could draw.

Tony Schwartz talks about some of the things that seperates elite performers from the merely very good in his book The Power of Full Engagement (HBR article here: http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corpo... ) One of the points he makes is that the very elite (he studied tennis players particularly) have rituals that they perform that allow them to reocover, refocus, and rest very efficiently. And that the more often an athlete stretches themselves physically or mentally beyond their own limits and relies on these rituals to help them succeed, the more powerful and effective the rituals become. So even without accounting for players changing their own playing style because of Tiger, they may suffer from impaired performance because they are simply not as practiced at performing at a high level within the crazy media and fan circus that surrounds Tiger Woods as Tiger Woods himself is. He clearly has developed and repeatedly stressed and practiced those rituals of performance within that environment far more than any one else has had chance to.

Schwartz goes on to relate this to performance as a "Corporate Athlete" but his tips have far more applicability in my mind to the startup environment than to the typical corporate environment.

Good golfers take risks. When Tiger Woods starts playing, they stop taking risks, so they end up being worse golfers.

That's another explanation.

Wow, this give an experimental basis to the distinction between "conscious competence" and "unconscious competence".

The thing I would be very curious about is whether other activities have the same dynamic or rather, in what activities is "thinking" more necessary in even when one achieves competence?

Btw, I highly recommend the author's (Jonah Lehrer) book "How We Decide". It's well written and informative.

You don't spend much time around athletes, do you? Athletes compete because they want to do well. Certainly, only a few at one time have a realistic chance of actually winning, but I reckon that most don't want one person/team to win continually.

This is easiest to see in US football and baseball leagues--the fans and the league prefer some degree of parity so a single team doesn't dominate the sport.

While I agree that most people don't want one person/team winning all the time, I believe that this does generate more interest, ie. Many people will take a vested interest in a baseball game so that they can cheer against the Yankees.

Cheering against the Yankees would be a waste of time if the Yankees literally won all the time. It would increase people's interest in the game the same way that a trick coin increases people's interest in betting on coin flips.

It wouldn't be interesting if Woods won all the time. In fact I might argue that underdog/Cinderella stories do as much for the sport as superstars.

Those two sentences aren't mutually exclusive. In 2006-2007 when Tiger was on a 7 tournament win streak, golf ratings were up because a lot of people wanted to see Tiger extend his win streak. Complementary to that, a lot of people also tuned in to root for whoever was in contention to upset that streak.

Probably not. As much as there are long-term benefits to increasing the popularity of the sport (larger purses in the future, etc.), golf tournaments are a zero-sum game. Everyone wants everyone else to do poorly, so they get a larger quantity of the available money.