Choking and The Yips

Abstract

Sporting skills divide contemporary theorists into two camps. Let us call them the habitualists and the intellectualists. The habitualists hold that thought is the enemy of sporting excellence. In their view, skilled performers need to let their bodies take over; cognitive effort only interferes with skill. The intellectualists retort that sporting performance depends crucially on mental control. As they see it, the exercise of skill is a matter of agency, not brute reflex; the tailoring of action to circumstance requires intelligent conceptual guidance. I think that both sides are right, and that both are wrong. We need to distinguish different aspects of sporting performance. When we do so, we will see that there are some aspects where thought is indeed the enemy of sporting success, but that there are others where mental control is crucial. I shall assume in what follows that the focus of the debate is ‘personal-level’ mental activity. The controversy is about whether mental entities like ordinary intentions, decisions, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on contribute to sporting performance, not whether the kind of sub-personal mechanisms that might be uncovered by cognitive science do so. We need to formulate the debate in terms of personal-level mental states because otherwise there would be no issue. If we ask whether any psychological activities make Phenom Cogn Sci (2015) 14:295–308 DOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9383-x