Psyched Up

by Daniel McGinn

  The standardized opening isn’t Jenkins’s only strength as a speaker. His grandfather was a Southern preacher, and by the time Jenkins was ten, his grandfather was routinely asking him to speak to the congregation, which usually numbered around two hundred people. While still in grade school, Jenkins learned to gauge and hold the audience’s interest, and to treat public speaking as a fun opportunity to tell a story. By the time he left for college, he was completely comfortable being at a podium with hundreds of eyes staring at him.

  Right about now you should be saying: “Hold up. You’re talking about practice, not getting psyched up. Jonathan Jenkins gives great speeches because he’s spent ten thousand hours doing it—not because of anything he does in the final few minutes before he performs.”

  I appreciate your skepticism. You’re right, to a point. Jenkins is a practiced speaker, and his standard opening wouldn’t work if he hadn’t done it so often.

  But his story still belongs in this book, because he’s found a way to increase his confidence even when speaking to a thousand people, and even during the part of a speech in which most people are most nervous—the very beginning. He’s turned what’s ordinarily a cognitively demanding task into something he recite easily from memory.

  The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman describes human cognition as operating in two distinct modes, which he calls System 1 and System 2. “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,” Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow. “System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it.”

  For most people, making a high-stakes presentation is a System 2 mental activity. But grafting something that’s automatic onto the front end of every presentation, Jenkins has effectively turned the opening into a System 1 task.

  Along with “relax” and “calm down,” another piece of standard advice for people in a nervous-making situation is “Don’t overthink it.” This advice makes sense because there are many situations in which thinking too much (or operating in System 2) is only going to cause problems. In these contexts, it’s better to find a way to shift to System 1, and to go on autopilot.

  Sian Beilock has spent twenty years studying how, when, and why people cause problems by overthinking. It’s a topic she learned about firsthand as a teenager. At fifteen, she was a soccer goalie in the U.S. Youth Soccer Olympic Development Program, a path that could have led her to Olympic or World Cup competition. Then one day, with the Olympic coach watching from just behind her goal, she could feel her brain behaving differently. “I felt self-conscious,” she recalls. “I had a total meltdown and let in two goals.” Her dreams of playing soccer in the Olympics ended that afternoon.

  But in the insight that her brain seemed to function differently under pressure, she found the beginnings of her academic career. As an undergrad she studied cognitive science, then she went on to earn doctorates in psychology and exercise science at Michigan State. Later she moved to the University of Chicago, where much of her research utilized a putting green, tricky math tests, and MRI machines.

  Early in her graduate work, Beilock became especially interested in two theories of why people choke under pressure, and how these forces exert themselves differently during different kinds of tasks. As she explained in her master’s thesis, some believe that distraction is a primary culprit when people fail under pressure. Instead of applying their attention and focus to the task at hand, people see their concentration sapped away by so-called task-irrelevant cues. Others believe the real culprit is explicit monitoring, which describes the exact opposite phenomenon: You become so keenly aware and overfocused on what you’re doing that you screw it up. The phrase “self-conscious” is aptly descriptive: You become too conscious of yourself.

  Beilock has been particularly fascinated by how these two forces play out in “proceduralized” activities that people don’t think about, and in activities that put demands on people’s working memory. Someone who plays a ton of golf has likely proceduralized putting. They can do it on autopilot. For this person, overthinking a putt is bad. Complicated math, on the other hand, requires one’s working memory, so overthinking is good and autopilot would be problematic.

  As Beilock writes in her 2010 book Choke: “The key is to have brainpower at your disposal, but to be able to ‘turn it off’ in situations where it may prove disadvantageous.” Choking, she writes, is usually the result of people “paying too much attention to what they are doing or not devoting enough brainpower to the task.”

  As Beilock’s research makes clear, an important element when getting psyched up to perform is to decide whether this is the kind of task you should be thinking about, or whether you should be on autopilot. Or, to put it in Kahneman’s language, should this activity utilize System 1 or System 2? Professional golfers should autopilot their putts; novice golfers, who haven’t practiced a putt thousands of time, need to give each putt more thought.

  Together, Jonathan Jenkins and Sian Beilock illustrate a part of psyching up that many people have never considered: In the moments before you perform, decide whether you’ll do better with your brain turned on or off, and proceed accordingly.

  5.

  Listening to motivational sound tracks and repeating positive affirmations aren’t the only ways to instill a sense of confidence before you perform. There are also ways to activate these emotions subconsciously, and research suggests it can be done by simply glancing at a photograph.

  Consider, for example, the photo hanging on the wall of Gary Latham’s office at the University of Toronto. It’s a large poster of a pole-vaulter who’s trying to clear a high bar. Underneath the image is a caption: “If at first you don’t succeed . . .” A colleague gave Latham the poster twenty-five years ago when he became department chair. Latham put it up on the wall and forgot about it. He never considered the banal image might make him better at his job. However, over the last decade, he’s done research suggesting this simple poster might help put him in the right mindset to perform.

  Latham is an organizational psychologist who’s spent more than forty years studying how people set conscious goals and go about achieving them. As Latham did his own research, a completely different set of studies made him angry—so angry that he set about trying to debunk them.

  The research involved a concept called priming. John Bargh, the Yale psychology professor who’s the field’s best-known researcher, defines priming as the study of “the temporary activation state of an individual’s mental representations, and how these internal readinesses interact with environmental information to produce perceptions, evaluations, and even motivations and social behavior.”

  That’s a complicated explanation, but it becomes easy to understand if you read about experiments in the field. Many of them ask subjects to solve simple word puzzles that, through subtle word choices, attempt to subconsciously manipulate the subject’s mental state, predisposing them to behave in a certain way. In a famous 1996 experiment, for instance, Bargh and some colleagues gave one set of subjects a word puzzle featuring words such as “rude,” “impolite,” and “obnoxious” (along with many other nonthematic words), and another set of subjects a puzzle featuring “cordially,” “patiently,” and “appreciate.” (A third group was primed with neutral words.) Then they placed the subjects, one by one, in a scenario in which they awaited instructions from someone engaged in conversation with a third person, and measured how long each subject waited before interrupting the conversation. They found the people who’d been primed to be rude interrupted the conversation far more quickly than people who’d been primed to be polite or hadn’t been primed at all.

  In the same study, Bargh primed a group of subjects with words like “Florida,” “wrinkle,” and “ancient,” and then measured how long each person took to walk down a hallway when leaving the experiment, compared to control groups. The result: being primed with
words that connote “elderly” makes people walk more slowly, as if they were elderly, too.

  As Latham read Bargh’s studies, he recalls thinking they were “unadulterated bullshit.” Latham believes the conscious mind guides behavior, and that all this subconscious mumbo jumbo was as suspect as the fraudulent 1950s experiment in which moviegoers allegedly bought more popcorn and soda after split-second subliminal ads for those products were inserted into a film. (The movie-snack experiment was later found to be a hoax.) Latham’s disapproval notwithstanding, by the early 2000s the priming studies were catching on. Bargh won wide professional acclaim, and Latham saw an influx of young grad students who were convinced of the power of priming. So he cooked up a plan to prove that priming is just plain nonsense.

  Unlike previous researchers, who did their experiments in labs, Latham decided to look for evidence of priming in an actual workplace: a university call center, where workers telephone alumni to solicit donations. His research team gave eighty-one employees an information packet outlining the day’s calls, but some of the packets were different from the others. One set contained an inspirational photo of a runner crossing a finish line. The study was designed to find out if just glimpsing a photo denoting success would affect how well the telemarketers performed. Can this simple image subconsciously prime workers to do their jobs better?

  The results were unmistakable: Workers whose packets contained the photo raised significantly more money than the unprimed workers. When Latham saw the results, “I nearly fell off of my chair,” he says. The whole point of the study was to disprove that priming really works. Latham assumed he’d made an error, so he began visiting other call centers to do similar studies. Each time, the results showed that workers whose instructions contained the photo raised more money. “I reluctantly shifted from being skeptical to being a believer,” Latham says.

  In subsequent papers, Latham expanded on those findings. In one study, also in a fund-raising call center, he tested how workers who viewed the same finish line photo performed against people primed with a “context-specific” photo—in this case, happy workers wearing telephone headsets in a customer service setting. His team found that call center workers who’d viewed the motivational call center photo performed better than people viewing the running photo (and better than the control group), and that the effect lasted not only for a few hours, but for several days. In another study, he tested how well fifty teams performed in a group activity in which they were asked to prioritize a list of survival items they’d need if they were in a spaceship that crash-landed on the moon. (This is a standard academic exercise to judge how well teams function.) Sure enough, the groups whose instructions had included a photo of a small team of people cooperatively working on a task around a table did better on the task, as measured by how closely their picks mirrored a team of NASA experts’ choices.

  Latham isn’t the only one exploring how priming can be a tool in workplace scenarios.

  The best-known research that marries priming with the type of work done by white-collar workers has been done by Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School. In 2010, Cuddy and some colleagues published a paper describing how they’d asked forty-two people to position their body in either a “high-power” or “low-power” pose, then engage in a risk-taking task, with each subject giving a saliva sample before and after the exercise. The “high-power” pose required standing with their hands on hips and feet apart, like Wonder Woman, or if seated, with their hands interlocked behind their heads, their feet up on a desk, their body open and exposed. The before and after spit tests showed that people who’d positioned themselves in the “high-power” pose experienced a marked increase in testosterone—a hormone associated with aggression—and a decrease in cortisol—a hormone marking stress. People who’d used “low-power” poses, with their arms crossed and their body contracted and small, experienced the opposite hormonal reactions. When it came to the risk-taking task, people who’d spent time in the power pose were much more willing to take risks. “The high-power posers reported feeling significantly more ‘powerful’ and ‘in charge,’” the study said. “A simple two-minute power-pose manipulation was enough to significantly alter the physiological, mental, and feeling states of our participants.”

  Cuddy’s 2012 TED Talk on the research went viral, and was followed by her 2015 book Presence. The work has turned her into a star, but it’s also proven controversial. Several other sets of researchers failed to find the same effect when they replicated the original experiment, and various statisticians have raised doubts about how the methodology and number crunching may have led to a “spurious” conclusion. In 2016, one of Cuddy’s collaborators on the original 2010 paper disavowed the results. In response, Cuddy said that despite the conflicting studies, at least nine other experimenters had found support for the basic gist behind what she describes as the “power-posing effect”—specifically, that “adopting expansive poses can make people feel more powerful.” Despite the scientific doubts, Cuddy’s work remains popular because it offers a seductive hook. “If you tweak your posture just a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds,” she says.

  Columbia professor Adam Galinsky and his colleagues have done research that offers a quieter, more private method to achieve the same end. In a 2013 paper, they asked people to write about a time they felt powerful or powerless for a few minutes, before compiling a job application letter or taking part in a mock interview. In both experiments, the people who wrote about a time when they felt powerful performed better. In an interview, Galinsky argued that, for most people, writing about their own power will be more effective than power posing. “Some people feel really inauthentic doing the posture,” he says. “The recall task is more private. It allows you to think about what you experienced and felt in that situation, and I think it’s easier to get into the right mindset.”

  It’s important to note that in all these priming experiments, the subjects weren’t aware of why they were posing like Wonder Woman, looking at photos of runners, or writing about a time when they felt powerful. This raises a crucial question: Since priming involves the subconscious mind, can people who purposefully power pose before an important event elicit the same thing intentionally?

  In other words, can someone intentionally prime themselves? Or is priming more like tickling, which doesn’t really work when you do it to yourself?

  Some researchers are dubious about self-priming. “The quick answer is that priming is a passive effect, and knowing about it gets in the way,” says Bargh, the Yale professor. However, he allows that if a person wants to be primed—for instance, if someone is on a diet and hopes to eat fewer calories—then priming that suggests healthy eating may create some effect, because the person’s mind is already inclined toward that goal.

  “My guess is the most practical self-priming in the conscious route would be for ‘reminders’ of what you want to attain—photographs of role models, or Post-it notes from one’s spouse, or of your elementary-school child’s drawings on the wall,” Bargh says. “If they remind you of what you yourself want, then you won’t fight the influence.”

  Latham, the Toronto professor, offers a similarly nuanced answer. Because priming, by definition, requires people to be unaware it is happening, self-priming is oxymoronic. “It’s a contradiction in terms to say I’m going to self-prime but I’ll be unaware I’m doing it,” he says. Someone who power poses before giving a TED Talk isn’t really priming. They’re really engaged in a physical, ritualistic form of psyching up, Latham says.

  However, he points to the pole-vaulter poster on his office wall as an example of the blurry line regarding awareness. He put the poster up decades ago, so it’s something he did to himself. But he’s seen it there every day for a quarter century, so he’s not very conscious that it’s hanging there. He never stops to focus on it or contemplate its meaning—it just blends into the background. At this point,
if the image is exerting any influence on him, it’s so subtle as to border on unconscious. “It’s just on the wall and I’m not noticing it, so that could be an example of self-priming,” he says.

  Although Latham had never heard of it before I interviewed him, there’s a company called Successories that’s spent more than thirty years trying to capitalize on that concept. Based in a small office park just off Interstate 95 in Delray Beach, Florida, the company sells posters featuring words like “Discipline,” “Accountability,” “Strength,” and “Persistence.” Each boldface word is paired with inspirational quotations and artsy images. Its best-selling work of motivational art, which has brought in millions of dollars in revenue, features a photo of the University of Virginia crew team rowing on a river at sunset above the block letters “TEAMWORK” and a quote from Andrew Carnegie about “the ability to work together toward a common vision.”

  Successories fills a basic need. Companies have blank office walls to fill. Managers can put up generic van Gogh reproductions, hang images specific to their business (glamour shots of products, for instance, or portraits of past CEOs), or hang posters that reinforce corporate virtues. Successories caters to the third category. “Our customers are putting something on the wall that can be deemed art, but it can be useful,” says Eric Haber, Successories’ president. “It’s a passive billboard in the hallway. It says ‘We believe in teamwork.’ Nobody is actively saying it, but the art that exists in the common areas is saying it.” Haber and his team routinely encounter Successories posters in car dealerships and high schools; one employee spotted one in the jury deliberation room at a courthouse.

  Latham hasn’t hung any new posters on his wall since the research turned him into a priming believer. But he has purchased a poster of The Little Engine That Could to adorn one of his grandchildren’s walls. He hopes that every time his grandchild sees the message “I think I can, I think I can,” he’ll be primed with a message of self-efficacy and persistence.