5 ms·
He's saying that rewarding success and punishing failure, combined with regression to the mean, leads to a perceptual bias in which we believe that the reward c
by yuzulicious 9y ago
He's saying that rewarding success and punishing failure, combined with regression to the mean, leads to a perceptual bias in which we believe that the reward causally failed and the punishment causally succeeded, because of actual but spurious contingencies that are induced.
Let's say that you repeat something over and over again with the same individuals, with random Gaussian outcomes on each trial. What will happen is that an individual who is at the extreme on one trial (positive or negative) will be more likely to be in the middle on the next trial, because the extreme deviations are extremely unlikely, and the middle deviations are relatively likely. So the really good person on one trial is likely to look worse on a subsequent trial, and the really bad person is likely to look better.
If you praise the person who did well on the initial trial, then, you will see good outcome -> praise -> worse outcome. If you punish the person who did poorly, you will see poor outcome -> punish -> better outcome. But this is spurious, because the good -> worse transitions and bad -> better transitions would have happened regardless of whether you praised or punished.
I think the thought experiment is imperfect for various reasons but does illustrate an important potential source of bias pretty well.
- Lewton 9y agoAs long as you keep in mind that it says nothing about whether scolding actually works or not. It only tells you what to account for if you want to test it
- a3n 9y agoI only read the linked summary. I think the lecturer and the objecting instructor are talking about two different things. The instructor's thesis is that positive reinforcement is more effective. I'm assuming that this was a measured, long term result, e.g. students that were positively reinforced did better on final tests or other summarizing measurements. The objecting instructor is talking about single instances "in the seat," not measured over time. "More often than not, the next maneuver ..." I'm assuming that a student's performance will be somewhat more random than an experienced practitioner's performance. So there would be a tendency for regression to the mean in isolated instances, and a small enough sample of instances would not be enough to predict final measured proficiency. Also because of the way the objecting instructor phrased his objection, I'm assuming that he hadn't checked his observations against the final summarizing measurements. This is how I made sense of the conflict between the two people.
- godelmachine 9y agoThat, kind sir, was a perfect explaination! Can't thank you enough for bringing the point home.