چه کسی در زیر فشار ساکت می شود (کم می آورد) پنج عامل بزرگ شخصیتی و تصمیم گیری تحت فشار

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether the Big Five personality factors could predict who thrives or chokes under pressure during decision-making. The effects of the Big Five personality factors on decision-making ability and performance under social (Experiment 1) and combined social and time pressure (Experiment 2) were examined using the Big Five Personality Inventory and a dynamic decision-making task that required participants to learn an optimal strategy. In Experiment 1, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed an interaction between neuroticism and pressure condition. Neuroticism negatively predicted performance under social pressure, but did not affect decision-making under low pressure. Additionally, the negative effect of neuroticism under pressure was replicated using a combined social and time pressure manipulation in Experiment 2. These results support distraction theory whereby pressure taxes highly neurotic individuals’ cognitive resources, leading to sub-optimal performance. Agreeableness also negatively predicted performance in both experiments.

‘Choking under pressure’ refers to the phenomenon whereby people underperform in high stakes situations relative to their level of performance without pressure (e.g., Baumeister, 1984, Beilock and Carr, 2005 and Markman et al., 2006). In the context of decision-making, choking under pressure occurs when individuals make effective decisions in low-pressure situations but sub-optimal decisions under pressure. Thus, their decision-making performance decreases as the level of pressure increases. Trait activation theory, which proposes that specific trait-relevant situational cues can be used to predict behavioral responses to those situations, may help explain how specific traits may elicit different behaviors in low- and high-pressure contexts (Tett & Guterman, 2000). Responses depend on both the relevance of a situation to a trait and the strength of the trait evoked. Thus, certain traits are more likely to emerge if a situation strongly evokes them (Lievens, Chasteen, Day, & Christiansen, 2006). Performance pressure often occurs in high-stakes success or failure situations, and consequently, these situations may activate certain traits, such as anxiety, narcissism, and fear of negative evaluation, that may in turn affect individual performance. For example, anxiety for test-taking or competitions has been shown to lead to decrements in performance in those situations, even though anxious individuals may be highly competent in low-pressure contexts (e.g., Ashcraft and Kirk, 2001, Beilock and Carr, 2005 and Martens et al., 1995). Fear of negative evaluation has also been shown to increase anxiety and decrease performance under pressure in athletes (Mesagno, Harvey, & Janelle, 2012). Moreover, low levels of narcissism have been associated with poor performance under pressure on both physical and cognitive tasks (Wallace & Baumeister, 2002). While previous research has examined how personality influences performance under pressure, it is less clear how personality would affect performance in the decision-making domain specifically. In the present study, we examine the important question of ‘who chokes under pressure’ by focusing on how individual differences in personality might affect decision-making under pressure. The Big Five personality model, comprising the factors of openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, is the most widely used classification of personality in psychological research (John & Srivastava, 1999). In decision-making domains, the Big Five model has been studied in the context of delay discounting, reward sensitivity, gambling, and risk-taking (e.g., Hirsh et al., 2008, Mecca, 2003, Nicholson et al., 2005 and Ostaszewski, 1996), though little is known regarding how the Big Five personality model plays a role in decision-making under pressure. However, one theoretical approach to examine choking under pressure during decision-making is offered by distraction theory, which proposes that pressure-filled situations distract attention away from the task, leading to poorer performance (Lewis & Linder, 1997). In contrast to explicit monitoring theory which applies in the context of proceduralized skills (Baumeister, 1984), distraction theory is relevant to cognitive processes, such as decision-making (Lewis & Linder, 1997). According to research on distraction theory, pressure generates mental distractions that decrease available working memory (WM) resources that should be allotted to cognitively demanding tasks (Beilock and Carr, 2005 and Beilock et al., 2004). In the context of decision-making, individuals who are preoccupied by the pressure component of a decision may be more likely to have reduced cognitive resources available to make an optimal decision. In regard to the Big Five traits, previous research has established that neuroticism is positively associated with anxiety and that this relationship is mediated by thoughts of rumination and worry (Muris, Roelofs, Rassin, Franken, & Mayer, 2005). Furthermore, anxiety has been shown to create intrusive thoughts that disrupt math problem solving ability by taxing WM resources (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001). Additional support for the detrimental effect of distraction theory on performance has shown that high-pressure situations also create mental distractions that compete for and diminish WM resources that are allocated to the task in low-pressure situations (Beilock, Kulp, Holt, & Carr, 2004). Therefore, under pressure more neurotic individuals should have higher levels anxiety and pressure-related intrusive thoughts that may occupy WM resources, leading to performance decrements as a result of decreased WM capacity in high-pressure situations compared to low-pressure situations. This theory offers a potential mechanism by which neurotic individuals may fail when they most need to succeed. Besides neuroticism, little work has related personality with both pressure and decision-making contexts. As a result, there are few inferences we can draw about the relationship between choking under pressure during decision-making and openness, extraversion, or agreeableness. With regard to conscientiousness, previous work with the N-back task showed that highly conscientious individuals are more focused on performance tasks, but are less effective at applying skills they learn to other tasks ( Studer-Luethi, Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, & Perrig, 2012). As distraction theory suggests, pressure may increase cognitive load and consume that focus and attention, leading to decrements in performance, or ‘choking’, compared to pressure-free situations. However, based on previous research with performance pressure and distraction theory, neuroticism was predicted to be the most likely trait to affect decision-making behavior under pressure. In order to assess decision-making performance, we utilize a reflective decision-making task in which the optimal strategy involves foregoing an option with larger immediate rewards on each trial in favor of an option that provides larger delayed rewards. Prior work using this task has shown that performing a concurrent dual WM-demanding task impairs decision-making performance whereby individuals selected the immediately rewarding option more, indicating that the task is WM dependent and that WM distraction could cause performance decrements (Worthy, Otto, & Maddox, 2012). By utilizing this task we can examine whether certain personality characteristics may make individuals more vulnerable to distraction of WM resources when placed under pressure, which would result in preference for the immediately rewarding option, and consequently impaired performance, on the task.