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i dont quite get the point, praise is better, but it is also placebo?
by zerostar07 9y ago
i dont quite get the point, praise is better, but it is also placebo?
- brazzy 9y agoNo, the point is that praise is better, but appears to be worse because you praise exceptional performance and people are unlikely to repeat or exceed that exceptional performance right away.
- zerostar07 9y agothat doesn't help deciding whether one should prefer praise or scold though , since he says both fall within placebo levels. If he is trying to say that there is more room for improvement from a bad performance, thats kind of obvious but it still means most of the time you will need to scold instead of praise.
- brazzy 9y agoThe evidence for praise being better is completely separate from this whole argument and comes from different sources. The article is about refuting a very misleading interpretation of common experience.
- andrewla 9y agoIn the particular example he describes, both are placebos, because the performance is essentially random, and even in that case, it will appear that punishment is better than praise, because the administration of punishment/praise is linked to performance, which in this example, is purely random. His thesis is that praise, in real-world situations, has a positive effect, and punishment has a negative effect, but on extremely short timeframes random effects dominate, leading to the reasonable empirical belief that praise is ineffective compared to punishment.