23 checked facts

Performance

Everything on this site about performance — each one naming the study behind it.

The presence of others disrupts your ability to learn.
While an audience can improve performance on familiar, well-learned tasks, their presence often impairs performance on…
Writing your worries down fixes your focus.
In a 2011 study, college students who wrote about their anxieties before an exam performed significantly better than t…
You perform worse when you try to consciously control movement.
Studies on 'choking under pressure' show that focusing on automatic movements impairs skill execution.…
Performing a simple ritual lowers your anxiety before high-stakes tasks.
Research shows that simple, repetitive ritualistic behaviors can reduce physiological distress before a performance, p…
Red colors subtly kill your performance on tests.
A 2007 study by Elliot et al. in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General found that viewing the color red befo…
You only act when the result seems possible.
Expectancy theory states that motivation is the multiplicative product of three factors: expectancy (that effort leads…
You perform better when you are slightly stressed.
The Yerkes-Dodson law describes an inverted-U relationship between stimulus strength and learning performance, origina…
You sabotage your performance to protect your ego.
Self-handicapping is the tendency to create obstacles to your own success so you have a ready-made excuse for failure.…
You exert less effort when working in a group.
The Ringelmann effect, or social loafing, shows that individuals contribute less energy to a shared task than they do …
People perform better because you expect them to.
Higher performance expectations lead to improved outcomes for the individuals being observed.…
You perform better at simple tasks when others watch.
The presence of an audience increases your speed on easy tasks.…
Your personal effort drops when you join a group.
The phenomenon of decreased group effort is often termed 'social loafing,' a term coined by Latané et al. in 1979, whi…
You perform better around others on simple tasks.
A 1965 study demonstrated that the mere presence of others increases the likelihood of your dominant response.…
Anxiety about performance can lower your actual results.
A 1995 study found that black students performed worse on tests when reminded of negative stereotypes about their inte…
You create your own barriers to protect your pride.
Self-handicapping is the psychological strategy of placing obstacles in your own path to provide an excuse for future …
Your expectations of others physically alter their actual performance.
The Pygmalion effect demonstrates that higher expectations from an authority figure lead to an improvement in an indiv…
You create your own excuses before you even start.
Self-handicapping is the strategy of creating obstacles to performance to protect your self-esteem if you happen to fa…
The presence of others changes how you perform tasks.
Social facilitation is the tendency to improve on simple, well-learned tasks when others are watching.…
You sabotage yourself to protect your ego.
A 1978 study found that participants chose to consume performance-inhibiting drugs when they were anxious about an upc…
You are convinced you are a better driver than most.
A 1981 study of student participants found that 93% of the U.S. sample rated their driving skills as being in the top …
You overestimate your ability on tasks you find difficult.
The hard-easy effect describes the tendency to overestimate one's own performance on hard tasks and underestimate it o…
You are harder on yourself during simple tasks.
Social facilitation reveals that the presence of others improves performance on simple, well-rehearsed tasks but degra…
An audience changes your performance depending on the task difficulty.
A 1965 study demonstrated that the mere presence of others improves performance on simple tasks while hindering it on …