The full name is the "Yerkes-Dodson Law of Social Facilitation." It's this idea that a task requires an optimal amount of nervous system arousal. Too much and you get jittery, too little and you get lethargic. So it looks like an inverted U with the optimal performance at a middle level of arousal.
Although you're right it's more complicated. If you're an expert at a task, then you do better if you have increased arousal. This is because stress hormones cause new synaptic production to slow down and old networks/circuits to increase in their conduction/strength. So if you're an NBA player, and it's the playoffs, you're going to be better than normal - because you're an expert at the task.
If however the task is 'complex' (like, say, software development) then if you put pressure on people (or if they're putting pressure on themselves), the performance falls significantly. I forgot the name of the study, but this was shown cross-culturally. They gave poor Indian men (in India) 3-months salary to solve a decently straight forward lateral thinking puzzle. The men who got paid performed way worse, then the other men who weren't paid at all.
Sometimes that strikes me as oddly familiar. Paying someone to do something they love and putting too much pressure on them makes their performance degrade.
The highest pressure situation I was in was for fed gov approaching deadlines having missed milestones. The more pressure the put on, the calmer and more relaxed I became. Everything worked out fine in the end because the managers didn't understand investing in developing a framework. When that was done all the apps came together, more or less with outliers needing more exceptional additions.
Although you're right it's more complicated. If you're an expert at a task, then you do better if you have increased arousal. This is because stress hormones cause new synaptic production to slow down and old networks/circuits to increase in their conduction/strength. So if you're an NBA player, and it's the playoffs, you're going to be better than normal - because you're an expert at the task.
If however the task is 'complex' (like, say, software development) then if you put pressure on people (or if they're putting pressure on themselves), the performance falls significantly. I forgot the name of the study, but this was shown cross-culturally. They gave poor Indian men (in India) 3-months salary to solve a decently straight forward lateral thinking puzzle. The men who got paid performed way worse, then the other men who weren't paid at all.
Sometimes that strikes me as oddly familiar. Paying someone to do something they love and putting too much pressure on them makes their performance degrade.