Scientists: Legit or not: Study says mental toughness is 14% of performance

For the study, Hall used a previously established tool to measure three components of mental toughness: confidence (self-belief), the sense of being in control, and constancy (concentration, determination, acceptance of responsibility, and stability of attitudes). Perceived effort, discomfort levels, use of mental skills and hardiness were also measured. Mental skills are actions like goal setting and refocusing. Hardiness is a personality trait tested in previous research.

Strikes me as pseudoscience.

Garbage, the mental toughness is in training

How come Seb Coe didn't run 1:39 as he was mentally stronger in 84 than 80

Pewow wrote:

He is a psychologist so of course it isn't legit. Psychology isn't a science. If it were they would have agreed upon units (all actual sciences use units derived from the SI base units) instead wishy washy confidence surveys. Psychology is a Social "Science" which means that instead of actually doing science they use (and abuse) statistics.

POPULAR psychology is not a science that is true, but psyhological TESTING is unbelievably accurate. The NFL,military,CIA,companies etc.use it all the time and I am sure that they can measure mental

toughness,leadership,stress reaction etc. The thing is someone could rank very high on mental toughness yet measure low on mental judgement. Toughness without judgement often leads to burnout/crackup.

Bad Wigins wrote:

to measure three components of mental toughness: confidence (self-belief), the sense of being in control, and constancy (concentration, determination, acceptance of responsibility, and stability of attitudes). Perceived effort, discomfort levels, use of mental skills and hardiness were also measured. Mental skills are actions like goal setting and refocusing. Hardiness is a personality trait tested in previous research.

is all psychobabble. Those things are not scientific concepts in the first place, let alone measurable.

More generally, the physical vs. mental thing is a false dichotomy. You aren't some ghost driving a machine, you are the machine, and the ghost is a needless abstraction invented by lazy people. Truly gifted athletes know this instinctively.

I agree with your main point, the physical and mental thing is a false dichotomy.

When you have running frightening workouts...you have reason to believe are capable of performing well relative to your opponents!

Gifted athletes...just are the performers who are objectively at the top of the percentile ranks. It's about "rarity".

It's still physical all the way down down! That's means your genome is what counts. The mental depends on the physical so to speak.

I could read it, but I don't see any citation or PDF. I don't have LinkedIn to see his page (which might have something), but will try later.

This 14% is probably from a coefficient in a linear regression of ultra time on the mental toughness measure and some self-reported control variables which measure physical fitness or past results. The quality of the control variables and the relationship between the control variables and the mental fitness variable is important, as the 'causation" can go both ways.

The article is clear about his data: "Hall surveyed 706 ultramarathoners at six international events, including the Marathon des Sables in Morocco and the Comrades Marathon in South Africa. The sample included 539 men and 167 women from multiple countries ranging in age from 22 to 69."

So this is for ultra times, not 800m.

He also has tried to gather and analyze data on how mental toughness affects rock climbing performance. He participates in both these sports.

remember that arsenic-utilizing bacteria paper in Science?...yeah that was peer reviewed. the peers didn't do their jobs.

Flat World Renegade wrote:

Wincest! wrote:

Whether a study is peer-reviewed has nothing to do with its validity.

Do explain.

14% of performance?

What is the definition of 14% of performance?

For a 15 minute 5k, that's 126 seconds. So at 15:00 flat guy could run 12:54 if he was mentally tough??? Give me a break.

A 30:00 10k guy can run 25:48 if he's mentally tough!!!

I'm trying to find the actual publication, anyone have a link? It's difficult, from the RW article, to understand what the 14% refers to (performance across individuals, I assume the author took personal bests into account, but it's not noted).

The conclusion is that 14% of the variance in performance can be accounted for by "mental toughness".What this means requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of statistics, but suffice it to say that it is very different from Rojo's reading of it above.A quick stab at what it does mean: There is a 0.14 correlation between mental toughness and race performance.Correlation is a number between 0 and 1 (you can have negative correlations too but let's ignore that).If the correlation is 0, then there is NO relationship between the variables. If that were the case here then knowing someone's mental toughness would tell you NOTHING about their predicted race performance.If the correlation is 1, then there is a PERFECT relationship between the variables; if that were the case here, then if you knew someone's mental toughness then you could predict their race performance with perfect accuracy.As the correlation in this study is 0.14, close to 0 but still significantly greater than 0, the conclusion is that mental toughness has SOME predictive value on race performance, but not a whole lot.

rojo wrote:

14% of performance?

What is the definition of 14% of performance?

For a 15 minute 5k, that's 126 seconds. So at 15:00 flat guy could run 12:54 if he was mentally tough??? Give me a break.

A 30:00 10k guy can run 25:48 if he's mentally tough!!!

variance is in squared units so for standardized variables then r= sqrt(0.14)=0.37.

One way to think about this is say I have 100 5K times. Plot the times on the Y axis against some variable like dew point on the X axis. Now add a horizontal line at the mean Y (mean race time). The deviation of all the points from this horizontal line is related to the variance. It is obvious that the more deviation the more variable one's times are and the higher the variance.

Now fit a regression (or trend line) of time as a function of dew point. This will be a sloped line and probably one that slopes up, that is times get slower as dew point increases. Now look at the deviations (in the vertical direction) to the sloped line. If the deviations are smaller, than dew point "explains" some of the variance of race times. How much? Just add up the deviations from the sloped line and divide by the sum of the deviations from the horizontal line - that's your percent explained (in statistics it is actually the squared deviations that are summed, but that doesn't matter to illustrate the point).

Moe's Tavern wrote:

Mental toughness is much more than 14% and champions are born with it. If you don't have it, get used to seeing your competition's butt.

.

"Mental toughness"is a psychological characteristic....and is as genetic a trait as extroversion or high aerobic ability.

So this 14% is about as useful to know as one's max VO2.

Wincest! wrote:

Flat World Renegade wrote:

Do explain.

Peer-review is a social convention, not a law of science that any new discovery has to stand up to, and academics regularly abuse the system to discredit and obstruct valid research whose implications threaten their own status.

Part of the peer review process is to look at the stats, methods and conclusions to see if they are supported by the current literature. At times a study may go against the grain, but as long as it follows the accepted scientific method, it adds to the body of knowledge.

Without that and the details of the study it is hard to say whether it is valid--even validity has a definition

Pewow wrote:

He is a psychologist so of course it isn't legit. Psychology isn't a science. If it were they would have agreed upon units (all actual sciences use units derived from the SI base units) instead wishy washy confidence surveys. Psychology is a Social "Science" which means that instead of actually doing science they use (and abuse) statistics.

There are a variety of areas of study of psychology. Some behaviors can be quantified just as you can quantify lactate levels in blood. Surveys and such as the best way we have to get at some aspects of what people are thinking/feeling/believing.

It is amazing how few people understand how the scientific method works and how peer review works and how statistics work.

rojo wrote:

ROJO, cmon!

14% of performance?

What is the definition of 14% of performance?

For a 15 minute 5k, that's 126 seconds. So at 15:00 flat guy could run 12:54 if he was mentally tough??? Give me a break.

A 30:00 10k guy can run 25:48 if he's mentally tough!!!

I think the author of this misplaces the words "mental toughness" with cognitive resources activation and allocation.

I can see what you are arguing, but I have to disagree with looking at is this way. Think of your CPU usage. As long as your computer is on and you have an OS, then you will be using a little of the CPU usage. This is to say, if you were in a vegetative state, you would find yourself at 0%. Living day to day may be 1-2%, easy jog 4-5%, and so on. IF you are truly capable having zero cognitive load while running 15:00/5k, I would think 12:54 would not be out of reach. I think too many of you are thinking that mental toughness comes as a response to "dig deep" when it gets rough. When you think about it, it takes mental toughness just to run an hour easy, but we have become accustomed to a certain threshold of "mental toughness" that it does not bother us.

Not saying this is correct, but I feel this is what the author is getting at.

Maybe a 12:54 guy would run 15 minutes with no mental toughness? That does admittedly seem ridiculous but given that most of us could probably agree to get through the training and racing of distance requires a certain amount of pain tolerance, courage, or whatever other esoteric term people loosely throw around to mean mental toughness.

So maybe 14% is fair and it is just that no one has ever run 30 minutes in the 10k with zero mental toughness. Or perhaps if they had they didn't maximize their mental toughness.

Just another way to look at it. In all truth it is just a study on too specific of subjects resulting in a number that is taken to mean something too universal given the study conditions.