Chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks changes when people watching them

Interesting study. The performance increase on the difficult task as audience size increases is counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense when you consider how many humans excel at performing in front of large audiences.<p>Yet for some of us the stress of being observed and scrutinized is crippling regardless of the task difficulty. I&#x27;ve bombed so many interviews because of this. :(

My performance on computer tasks changes when people watch me. I suddenly forget how to type.

It seems like just the general idea of ‘an audience’ is too broad.<p>Take a football match. The presence of your own fans has a big positive effect (usually). Presence of the other teams fans has a negative effect (usually).<p>I would expect that the belief of the person doing the task about the audience and whether they make them feel supported or nervous or angry or whatever other complex emotion would all change the effect

Checks out with what I read in &quot;Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.&quot;<p>Man, I read that book to my kids so many times I can probably still recite it in it&#x27;s entirety.<p>I miss having little kids.

This might be why I do so well at a coffee shop sometimes.

Very interesting result! It does kind of baffle me, though, when people describe things as “uniquely human” when even a passing familiarity with basically any mammal (and often other ‘simpler’ creatures) reveals that they also do these things.

So every time someone fails doing a demo it is proof that they are great at the task and or performing demos, because if they found it hard thier performance would have improved and they would have smashed it, so they must have found i easy.<p>I will be adding this to my list of demo failure excuses.

Having someone watch me coding helps immensely to tame my ADHD.<p>Opening HN because brain is bored is not an option.

Chimps&#x27; prompt engineering.

&gt; The significance of witnesses to humans under various contexts could be explained by the importance of reputation management to our species.<p>It could also be explained as the researches accidentally recreating &quot;Clever Hans.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clever_Hans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clever_Hans</a>

Mine gets worse when people watch me.

Can&#x27;t wait for a middle manager to quote this study at me to justify his no-WFH policy.

mean reversion to the level of available feedback seems like the principle at play.

All hail the quantum chimpanzees!<p>(No, that&#x27;s not how quantum mechanics work)

Sometimes the jokes write themselves

The title should have been...<p>Monkey Seen, Monkey Do

Because they think they&#x27;re getting treats for it, from the humans.<p>I don&#x27;t think they see any value in computer tasks other than getting treats.

Same with humans!

Pretty much all of that headline has me saying &quot;wait, what??&quot;

Pretty soon the apes in charge are going to be using this study to demand that the chimps return to the office 5 days per week.

This matches what we&#x27;ve observed at the company I work at.<p>The chimpanzees seemed like a big cost saving at first but when you factor in the wages of the human supervisors, it&#x27;s hardly worth the legal issues it causes.

That&#x27;s why I&#x27;ve a manager

&gt; Audience + Easy Task = Performance Decrease &gt; Audience + Difficult Task = Performance Increase<p>I haven&#x27;t been able to replicate this during coding interviews

So the chimps will be the ones to finally bring open office plans to an end?

Paradoxically, my work slows when chimpanzees are in the room observing me

Maybe they&#x27;re quantum chimpanzees

&gt; Model 2: Performance changes with the number of total audience present<p>I hope everyone realizes what this means, just look at those scaling laws: if we can just fund a company that gets money to pay potentially millions of people to watch a chimpanzee performing a difficult task, we could potentially get super human intelligence.<p>If we can get, and I know this sounds wild, trillions of dollars in funding we might be able to pay <i>billions</i> of people to watch a single chimp and that will potentially lead us to singularity, saving us from climate change.