  Understanding and predicting how individuals perform in high-pressure
situations is of importance in designing and managing workplaces, but also in
other areas of society such as disaster management or professional sports. For
simple effort tasks, an increase in the pressure experienced by an individual,
e.g. due to incentive schemes in a workplace, will increase the effort put into
the task and hence in most cases also the performance. For the more complex and
usually harder to capture case of skill tasks, there exists a substantial body
of literature that fairly consistently reports a choking phenomenon under
pressure. However, we argue that many of the corresponding studies have crucial
limitations, such as neglected interaction effects or insufficient numbers of
observations to allow within-individual analysis. Here, we investigate
performance under pressure in professional darts as a near-ideal setting with
no direct interaction between players and a high number of observations per
subject. We analyze almost one year of tournament data covering 23,192 dart
throws, hence a data set that is very much larger than those used in most
previous studies. Contrary to what would be expected given the evidence in
favor of a choking phenomenon, we find strong evidence for an overall improved
performance under pressure, for nearly all 83 players in the sample. These
results could have important consequences for our understanding of how highly
skilled individuals deal with high-pressure situations.
