Fear of math can outweigh promise of higher rewards

Math anxiety is far from uncommon, but too often, those who dread the subject simply avoid it. Research from the University of Chicago offers new evidence for the link between math anxiety and avoidance-as well as possible paths toward breaking that connection. UChicago psychologists found that people who are math-anxious often steer away from more difficult math problems, even when solving them leads to much larger monetary rewards. "You can be motivated to do well in something, but still make suboptimal decisions in subtle ways," said UChicago doctoral student Jalisha Jenifer, who led the study with postdoctoral scholar Kyoung Whan Choe. "Asking people to choose between easy, low-reward problems and hard, high-reward problems was an excellent way for us to see how individuals with math anxiety might make suboptimal decisions to avoid math in their everyday lives," Choe said. Published Nov. 20 in  Science Advances , the innovative study produced the first experimental evidence that math anxiety can predict math avoidance-a connection that was widely suggested but not verified by prior research.