The effects of supervisory threat on decision making and risk taking in a simulated combat game.

William Tell's tour de force with the crossbow is probably the most celebrated example of performance unimpaired (possibly improved) by psychological stress. Stage fright has been known to ruin a performance and also to make it great. At any rate, the question of how psychological stress affects performance is an open one, probably because many kinds of performances, conditions, and types of threat are subsumed under the question. In this paper, the effect of threat (in the form of a severely displeased military superior) is examined with respect to a task involving vigilance, data processing, and decision making in simulated (automated) combat.