This is something I’ve noticed in myself and in others. I (or someone else) can be doing a stellar job, but as soon as someone mentions I’m doing great, I start messing things up, making mistakes all of time, missing important details…etc
Just wondering if there’s a science to that.
In: Other
In addition to psychological reasons like getting stressed, there’s an aspect of memory involved often.
If you’re good at something, it generally means you’ve committed the process to procedural memory. Procedural memory is fairly automatic. You don’t have to think very hard, your body just flows with the procedure, like throwing a three pointer in basketball for skilled athletes.
Someone yelling about doing good causes you to pay attention to what you’re doing. Ironically, this interferes with the smooth flow of your procedural memory and introduces more conscious, controlled behavior back into the thing you’re doing. The skill you developed involves that unconscious procedural memory, but now you’re too conscious to access it properly, so you do worse.
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