Rats and cockroaches are pretty social creatures; so should we interpret this as evidence for Hanson's status theory of choking, that it's to avoid appearing to the elites to be dangerously competent?
Is competence dangerous for rats and cockroaches? My guess is that there is no cost to a cockroach for being seen by other cockroaches to have run a maze quickly. If that guess is correct, then that study in isolation is a piece of evidence against Hanson's status theory of choking.
And, more directly, the study is evidence for the optimal level of arousal / social facilitation theory of choking. For each task, there is an optimal level of physiological arousal - increasing arousal improves performance up to that point, and then hinders performance if it...
(Epistemic) rationality has two major components:
Attending takes time, energy, quiet, etc. Circumstances where human rationality degrades include when:
It seems relatively easy to test rationality smarts; repeatedly give folks info and time to work new problems and measure their accuracy, calibration, etc. And I have an idea for testing for rationality toughness: compare performance on info-similar pairs of good/bad-circumstance problems.
For example, assume people are better at evaluating if a spouse is cheating when considering an acquaintance in their social circle, relative to a stranger or their own spouse. If so, we could pose them a pair of problems with very similar info structure, one with an easy spouse and one with a hard spouse. The closeness of their response in these two cases would then be a measure of their rationality toughness.
Of course this test may fail if the similarity is too obvious, or the pair are asked too closely in time. But maybe we don't even need to ask the same person the two questions; perhaps we could usefully compare someone's answer on a hard question to answers from a pool of similar people on matched easy questions.
While I haven't thought this through, it already suggests a training technique: consider matched hard/easy circumstance problems and compare your answers, separated by enough time that you forget most of your previous analysis.