This article is a condensed version of our podcast on this topic: When is a Law Not A Law. You can listen to it here.
What Is The Yerkes Dodson Law?
The Yerkes Dodson law is quite often used to help people understand how stress impacts performance.
In these instances, you’ll see it on a slide in a presentation where it’s called the stress curve.
At the corner where the two axes meet, you have very low stress. You are likely to be inactive because there’s no arousal, no stimulus to get you to do something.
In the workplace, if there wasn’t any stress, a lot of people would be inactive. If there’s an increase in the stress, we might be doing something, but be very laid back about it. We’ll get on with it, and do a bit, but we’ve got all the time in the world.
Then as we go further, there’s an optimum point, supposedly, where it’s the right amount of stress to cause the right amount of arousal so that you perform at your best.
Like getting a reasonable, achievable deadline for a project.
Then the suggestion is that once we tip over the top of the bell, where there’s too much stress, then we perhaps get to the place of exhaustion. Our performance tends to drop off.
If we get even more stress, we get to the point of anxiety, panic, maybe some anger and then finally a breakdown, maybe burnout because there’s too much stress.
Or we may just go off sick and let everyone else deal with it.
This is a model that we’ve seen rolled out on many occasions relating to stress.
It’s become known as the Yerkes Dodson law.
Who are Yerkes and Dodson?
Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson were American psychologists who lived between the 1870s and the 1950s. So the research that they published in 1908 was what became known as the Yerkes Dodson Law.
What they were actually doing was studying learning and habit formation in mice. The mice learned a path round the maze. If they were given a weak electric shock, the learning / habit would take longer to form.
If they increased the level of shock a bit more, they did it quicker. The habit formed quicker.
And then when they increased the shock even more, again, the habit took longer to form.
For a long time, no one really took any notice of this research.
And then over 40 years after, someone picked up on it, and noticed it had a curve and started to use it. This was Donald Hebb.
Hebb (in 1955) was looking at the difference between arousal and performance; not stress necessarily, but the level of activation of arousal required for you to be motivated to take action. So even his work wasn’t around stress. It was about arousal.
You’ve got two guys with electrocuting mice, then you’ve got another guy talking about incentivising people to take action and do some work. How has that become the stress curve of Yerkes Dodson?
Quietly. It’s just morphed into that over time. A bit like the Kubler Ross change curve. She didn’t have a change curve, but her work morphed in to the Kubler Ross change curve.
The Yerkes Dodson model became a law. They did at least have a curve, but about habit formation in mice when they were given electric shocks. So not entirely relevant.
And it’s attributed to or applied to all sorts of different things, stress being just one of them.
So where does that leave us?
You could argue that the amount of stress we’re put under could lead to an increase in performance and then tailing off, but I don’t think the research exists to demonstrate that. Most of the stress that we talk about in terms of the workplace that is bad for us or is perceived as being bad for us is chronic stress that tends to be around mental health rather than activity levels. So, you could be put under quite a lot of acute stress and respond really well in terms of performance. So the curve doesn’t apply
It leaves us with the fact that we can’t have a curve where the amount of stress we are put under results in a collapse in a performance, because lots of people will demonstrate excellent performance under high stress and lots of people within the NHS do that consistently and do every day really well under a lot of stress.
Everyone’s reaction to stress can be different. Many people have extreme stress applied to them and perform really well. Many healthcare professionals will keep going. Now they’re probably wrong to keep going, but they will keep going and they’ll keep performing at high levels. They will keep doing that and their performance doesn’t necessarily drop off. They may well be paying the price for it personally, and if we get to the place of chronic stress and heading towards burnout, then there will be a drop off. But that’s a different thing. That’s not the stress being applied to them, the pressure being applied to them, that’s something else going on for them.
So if you’re presenting on stress and stress management, which is one of the pillars of lifestyle medicine, before using this model as a demonstration in any way, it might be worth just checking some facts and working out whether it’s an appropriate model to use.
If you go looking for the model online, you will find it, The Yerke’s Dodson Law is out there, everywhere. It looks like there’s plenty of evidence. But it’s just the proliferation of articles about Yerkes Dodson. There’s no law about it. It’s a myth.
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