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Yerkes-Dodson Law

Explanations > Motivation > Yerkes-Dodson Law

Description

Human performance at any task varies with arousal in a predictable parabolic curve. At low arousal, people are lethargic and perform badly. As arousal increases, performance also increases - but only to a point, after which increasing arousal actually decreases performance.

Arousal in this context can also be thought of as stress, which is felt as an inner motivating tension.

Discussion

Without some motivating tension we have no reason to act. In this way, stress can be thought of as a good thing. We are built to be motivated by stress so this often happens.

The problem is that too much stress results can cause performance to decline again, sometimes sharply if cognitive or nervous breakdown is triggered. A downturn can also be caused by excessive attention to a task such that extra factors that are important get missed.

The behavior in the downturn has been called satisficing and is quite differently motivated from the earlier stages. Rather than gain satisfaction or reward from actions, the person who is is satisficing seeks any way of reducing their stress. This can lead to sub-optimal solutions being used, which accounts in part for the performance decline.

Interestingly, the Chinese for 'stress' is written with two characters. The first is 'danger' and the next is 'opportunity'. This highlights that stress is not all bad and that benefits can be gained from using felt pressure.

So what?

So when motivating people, find ways to increase their arousal level but only to the point where performance is maximized. Different people have different overload points so do be careful about this.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Description

Discussion

So what?

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