Erik Bijleveld is currently an Associate Professor at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on motivation. In particular, he studies the boundary conditions of incentive-triggered increases in human performance. For example, his studies examine how and when incentives can distract people from their ongoing activities, making them less effective. Relatedly, he also examines the phenomenon called ‘choking under pressure’, which arises when the incentives at stake are excessively valuable. In addition, he is fascinated by the conscious experiences that can be triggered by motivated mental work, such as feelings of fatigue, effort, and frustration (for example, some of his experiments examine how fatigue affects people’s decisions). While most of his work fits the tradition of experimental psychology (he tries to do well-controlled experiments in the laboratory), he also works on applied projects that address the role of motivation in real-life settings.