Does Pressure Affect Performance? An Evaluation of the Yerkes–Dodson Hypothesis with NCAA Basketball Performance and a Continuous Measure of Pressure to Win

In a seminal article, Yerkes and Dodson report some suggestive evidence that increasing external stimulus may raise performance to a peak but that further stimuli deceases performance. However, evidence for the Yerkes–Dodson conjecture outside of laboratory and field experiments is limited due to issues of the measurability and salience of pressure, whether the tasks are novel or routine to the agent, and are effort or skill tasks. We argue that free throws in collegiate (NCAA) basketball provide a setting in which pressure is measurable and highly salient for a routine skill task. We measure pressure as the probability that a player making a free throw wins the game. This measure is both continuous and salient to players. For NCAA male basketball players, we investigate the Yerkes–Dodson hypothesis of the relationship between pressure and the probability of making free throws. We find evidence of a Yerkes–Dodson relationship in NCAA free throws, with peak performance occurring at the 95th percentile of the pressure distribution; however, sparse data at even higher levels of pressure limit the conclusions we can draw.