Jonathan_Graehl comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong

66 Post author: XFrequentist 10 September 2010 12:25AM

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Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 10 September 2010 08:50:07PM *  3 points [-]

snowballing chain of reinforcements

This study points out that if you think about (or have) just a single episode of past success or failure, that it has the opposite effect you'd expect on future performance (i.e. what works in the direction you would expect is to reflect on a pattern of experience of failure or success, then you will have summarized/abstracted from the individual events and expect them to serve as the rule, not the exception).

That is, remembering a single failure made people perform better (I assume because they were able to avoid some of the mistakes, or simply try harder, without feeling completely helpless and likely to fail).

Comment author: jacob_cannell 10 September 2010 09:02:48PM 4 points [-]

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but from the abstract it appears they compared general vs specific episodic memory, and do not reach the conclusion you claim.

The particular quote:

As expected, it was found that general memories of failure and specific memories of success resulted in worse performance than general memories of success and specific memories of failure

The study just shows that general memories have a more pronounced effect than specific memories - it doesn't show the effect of a specific memory alone.

The takeaway is that recalling a specific example of success is not a powerful self-hypnosis strategy. That is why you need the snowball effect - you need enough past successes to change your subconscious evaluations.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 10 September 2010 10:22:02PM *  1 point [-]

I assumed they had also shown some isolated improvement from a specific memory of failure alone, which was indeed surprising to me.

Some of the participants were asked to reflect on a number of their past successes or failures by completing the sentence: "In general, I'm successful (I fail) when...."

The other participants were focused instead on a single episode of success or failure, by completing the sentence: "I succeeded (failed) once when I had to...."

The results were remarkable. People who were asked to reflect on their many past successes or a specific failure scored roughly 10% better on tests of mathematical ability, as well as verbal, spatial, and abstract reasoning, than those who reflected on either many past failures or a single specific success.

So my report of the article was correct. So, if what you say is true, then the article misrepresented the study (which I also have not read).

Comment author: jacob_cannell 10 September 2010 11:18:51PM *  2 points [-]

Yeah I started reading the article and then after a few paragraphs realized "this isn't a physics paper, it would be quicker to just read the original". If I wasn't busy/lazy, I'd read the full paper and comment on the article to point out that it misrepresents its source paper, but it's not a wikipedia article, so I don't care so much. Happens all the time.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 11 September 2010 01:45:25AM 1 point [-]

Cool. The average quality of thinking on the blog (psychologytoday) is really low, so I should probably treat it like you do.

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