Yeah, that's common, but as with most chess things there's no easy fix because you can error by over correcting (playing too carefree against higher rated and too solid vs lower rated).
Is "fear factor" a real thing?
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Like many people, I tend to play better against quality opposition, and worse against low-rated opposition.
Interesting. I feel like I play my best against evenly-matched opposition. Against really strong opponents I get cagey and against really weak ones I start trying to make cheapos.
I'm interested to know if this has been studied experimentally. You could probably trawl through the publicly available games on Lichess or something with an engine and report whether avg. centipawn loss (controlled for player strength of course) is higher against stronger opposition. Has anyone done anything like this?
But it's actually wise to not play at full strength vs very weak players, because you'll be wasting 90% of your effort calculating difficult variations that will never happen. It's just common sense not to play at full strength even though people rarely mention this.
I often play unrated training games against weaker players, and I rarely play those games at full strength.
This gives the weaker players a tough challenge... even when playing below strength, I'm still pretty hard for a 1500 player to deal with... and it holds out the possibility that maybe they'll earn some bragging rights by beating a 2000+ player.
We keep the games unrated for obvious reasons... so that I can't be accused of snatching rating points from players far below my strength, and so that I won't lose hundreds of points to a single moment of inattention.
I play my rated games in club team matches.
A recent study showed that when women play men, contrary to who one might think, the women play above their expected level. It didn't say, but I'm guessing the men played below their expected level. This does, however, seem to indicate that people aren't machines and their opponents, or rather their perception of and reaction to their opponents, can make a difference. What difference, for better or for worse, might depend upon the player himself.
batgirl wrote:
A recent study showed that when women play men, contrary to who one might think, the women play above their expected level. It didn't say, but I'm guessing the men played below their expected level. This does, however, seem to indicate that people aren't machines and their opponents, or rather their perception of and reaction to their opponents, can make a difference. What difference, for better or for worse, might depend upon the player himself.
That's interesting.
I've played a number of women, but I don't think my play or focus or anything else changes.
I just remembered an interesting story.
I played a woman once, and she was a little better than me (I'd played her before), and she won the game.
Ok, so far a pretty boring story, the interesting thing is after the game she apologized for beating me 
I thought that was pretty weird. She was really shy though, so maybe she didn't want me to be mad? I told her it was ok, and asked her where I went wrong and we analyzed a little bit.
(Obviously not representative of all women, I think she was just really shy even though she was maybe 10-20 years older than me)
Do people play worse against higher-rated opponents? Sometimes when I play lower-rated people I feel like they let me get away with things they'd normally punish - i.e. if I make some kind of mistake, they might suspect that it's a trap and not take advantage of it. Does anyone know if this has been scientifically studied at all?
(It's not hard to imagine an experiment - Chess.com could just mess with the displayed rating of the opponent once in a while)
Also, a related question, maybe people play worse against lower-rated opponents (I sometimes fish about for cheap tricks against weaker opponents, rather than keeping my eye on the ball, and get myself in trouble).