Oct 03 2011
Learn from Your Mistakes – Or Don’t
Psychologists are discovering that attitude is often a self-fulfilling prophesy. Richard Wiseman pointed out, for example, that if you feel you are lucky you will, in fact, have more “luck.” Specifically, you will create opportunities, you will take opportunities, and you will try harder because you are optimistic about the future. You will, in essence, make your own luck.
There is no magical “secret” to this effect, and no, you cannot change the world simply by wishful thinking. But your attitude and beliefs about yourself affect how you behave, and sometimes attitudes become self-fulfilling. The general principle seems to be – that it is better to be optimistic than pessimistic.
A new study is in line with this principle. Researchers in this case focused on attitudes regarding the ability to learn from one’s mistakes. They gave subjects a simple test – identifying the letter in the middle of a five-letter sequence. This is an easy task, but when done over and over eventually people make mistakes. The research focused on how they react when such mistakes occur. Some individuals seemed to learn from their mistakes, increase their effort, and improve later performance. Others did not recover from the mistake and improve their later performance.
These behaviors correlated with the subjects’ attitudes. Those who felt they could learn from their mistakes, did. Those who felt that intelligence and performance are fixed characteristics did not improved their performance after the error. Again – these attitudes appear to be self-fulfilling.
The researchers also peeked at brain function with EEG mapping during the task. After the mistake was made, every subject had a specific spike in activity – the recognition of the error. But those who learned from their mistake had a prominent second reaction (spike in activity in a specific brain region) while those who did not learn from their mistake had less of a second reaction.
With such correlational studies it is not possible to separate out the arrow of cause and effect (which is often not clean when it comes to brain function anyway). In other words – are we seeing a difference in brain function leading to the behavior, or is the behavior learned and we are just visualizing the brain function that underlies the learned behavior? More study will need to be done to sort this out. Specifically, it would be interesting to see if people can switch into the optimistic group with a little cognitive therapy.
If we take the lesson from this and other studies – it is better to assume that people can change (a recursive self-fulfilling belief). You should be optimistic about your ability to become more optimistic.
There is an interesting tension here. The psychological literature clearly shows that people’s beliefs and behaviors are highly malleable. There are a myriad of ways that we can be psychological manipulated. And our assumptions about ourselves and the world affect our outcomes. From this perspective it is better to believe that you can achieve your goals, that effort makes a different, that you can improve yourself and correct your mistakes, and that effort is rewarded. These optimistic attitudes will motivate you to improve yourself and your life.
On the other hand, many have observed that we are currently living in the “American Idol” generation – where many people believe that they can achieve whatever they desire, even if they lack the talent or ability. This goes beyond optimism to almost a feeling of entitlement – the younger generation feels they are entitled to not only success but to excellence. The American Idol reference comes from the early parts of the season when we are treated to many contestants who are hopelessly terrible singers, but are deluded into thinking (often, it appears, with the support of parents and friends) into thinking that they are “the next American Idol.”
How do we reconcile these two apparently contradictory observations? I think, as with many things, it is all about balance. The advantages of a positive attitude are now highly documented in the research. But perhaps this positivity needs to be tempered by realism.
Further, my personal opinion is that the realism does not necessarily have to involve the ultimate limits of our ability, but the amount of work it takes to achieve. The entitlement problem is that people feel they deserve to be successful even without all the hard work. While the research shows that it is the belief that hard work can pay off that pays off.
Sure – some people have natural talents. But successful people seem to share the trait of thinking that hard work is worth it, and they achieved through hard work – even if it seems effortless.
I don’t know if anyone can become an American Idol with enough hard work, despite their starting point of natural talent. But I also don’t know that they can’t. Some psychologists who have studied this type of question have come to the conclusion that with sufficient work and effort anyone can master pretty much anything. Mastery is a matter of the 10,000 hours of practice, not inborn gifts.
The take home message is that it is better to be optimistic and to assume that hard work will be rewarded with skills and success. It is also better to focus on the process rather than the result. This all applies to critical thinking and scientific knowledge as well. We can all make the world a smarter place – if we believe we can and focus on the process of doing so.
15 Responses to “Learn from Your Mistakes – Or Don’t”
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“But perhaps this positivity needs to be tempered by realism.”
So so true. I find it amazing that some of the kids I lecture/tutor just think that they can get away with anything: top marks for doing nothing.
It’s all about being tough but fair. Kids should be told what they’ve done wrong for sure, but also taught how to improve upon their skills.
Think study just demonstrates that if you make someone think they can do a good job, the eventually will, with the right guidance of course.
The question of whether our brain function makes us less likely to learn from a mistake, or if our belief that we will fail causes the brain to function is a big issue in my mind.
I remember reading that a habit works in the brain like a sled running down a snow covered hill. Once you slide down the same furrow a few times, the furrow is so deep that changing course is hard because you have to jump over the lip of the furrow. So, once a brain has established a route of connections for a behavior it is far more likely to choose that route again, rather than find a different route.
Even if you have a positive attitude, once you have developed the habit of thinking of yourself as unable to correct your mistakes, its hard to overcome that brain function which keeps you in behavior of repeating the mistake.
I wonder if we are too general in thinking that “positive attitude” is the answer. Its a lovely sentiment, but if your brain has assigned a certain route to a behavior and you keep your focus on just a general “I can do this” idea, it seems very unlikely that you will jump out of a particular furrow. You would need to focus your attitude on that particular part(s) of the behavior which your brain has routed toward failure.
Of all the actions we take, assume that there are lots of different brain activities. Any one (or more) of them could be the specific furrow that is causing your repeated error. How do you know which one to change?
Further, with every completed error, you are reinforcing the idea that you cannot learn from your mistakes. (the furrow is getting deeper) So that the cognitive dissonance between the “positive attitude” and your actual experience is going to deteriorate any “positive” focus you have.
I guess I think there needs to be a bit more depth to the idea that we can overcome all with a positive attitude. I do agree that I can change outcomes with my focus. But I think its not a universal thing, its not quite as simple as “Yes, I can”.
I think the issue here is that there is a difference between “wishful thinking” and “positive thinking”. Wishful thinking involves an overt or covert belief in the Supernatural (and is destined to be disappointing). Positive thinking simply recognizes that one can take their natural talents to a greater level by adding in some hard work and effort. Whether “natural talent” plus “hard work” equals “something amazing” depends entirely on the magnitudes of each of the factors in the sum.
Another confounding factor in evaluating positive thinking,is that there are certain personalities who don’t readily acknowledge that they have made an error.Those are the type that repeatedly make the same mistakes over and over,and tend to blame external forces for their mistakes.In some since this is a kind of myopic positive view of themselves which tends to backfire.
There is a very inspiring book by David Shenk that takes a scientific look into some of the stuff in this article, especially about the importance of hard and good work:
http://geniusblog.davidshenk.com/
Clearly, in my experience, some people are simply physically faster than others to begin with and no matter how hard or how well someone else trains he or she is never getting to the level where that person is at. But, as Steve pointed out, do we really know this though? It might more or less be the case in straightforward stuff like a 100m sprint, and I suspect it is, but in many other sports and activities the hard and good work really pays off in the long run, but if the attitude is not there it’s never going to happen.
This could be one of the cases where some people really do benefit from “God’s will” if they have an overwhelming belief that this is what God has in plan for them. It motivates them to train against all odds, some of them will get through and thank God for their success, when in fact it was due to their own exceptionally hard and systematic work. David Shenk didn’t raise this point in the book, but I’ve had some friends who have clearly been motivated by their “blind faith” in this manner and gained a lot of success in their fields without really being that “talented” as a young.
I found the book very inspiring and would like to hear others thoughts about it too. It seemed a bit too good to be true in some places, which is one of the reasons I posted here, maybe someone who knows more about the studies mentioned could sort out the good stuff from the not so good stuff.
Anyways, I strongly recommend this book, if only for the inspiration.
Monotony effects rate of errors. If the task is boring like this psych study, you get results which illustrate tedium. This is unlike playing a Scrabble game where the letters can change frequently.
I think you have a real point with entitlement. American idols can be anyone without talent. All you need is a catchy name like 50 Cents.
Oh, and here’s one of Shenk’s messages in a shorter form, a YouTube clip from a Tedx event:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE6lWGzO_7A&feature=player_embedded#!
This reminds me a lot of freshman year at MIT. One of the most common phrases uttered by freshmen is “that is counter-intuitive”. Many freshmen would utter this whenever they made a mistake or got an idea wrong. I always saw it as a way to externalize the error, to find fault with the idea not corresponding with intuition, rather than noticing that your intuition didn’t correspond with reality and discarding that faulty intuition because faulty intuition is worse than useless, it can actually lead you into harm.
When ever my intuition was wrong, I made a conscious effort to change it until it did correspond with reality. You do that for tens of thousands of hours and boy does it make a big difference as to how reliable your intuition is. But to do that, you have to monitor your intuition and not just blindly follow it.
It is like being a skeptic, once you become expert at it, and get in the habit of doing it all the time, it becomes second nature and becomes automatic. Expertise in skepticism and logic is a very powerful thing to overlay any other type of expertise. It may not add so much expertise by itself, but it does allow sorting and checking of every other kind of expertise in ways that many “experts” can’t.
I think this is one of the things that has allowed me to see the errors that people have made in physiology. I have a very hard time tolerating inconsistencies between data and my interpretation of the data.
“Specifically, it would be interesting to see if people can switch into the optimistic group with a little cognitive therapy.”
Isn’t this the mechanism in which cognitive behavioral therapy works? It seems to me that the evidence is already there to some degree… change the way you think, and it will change the way you feel (arent they really 2 sides of the same coin?). To me, the issue is how permanent the change is. It seems to be that the degree and duration of change is directly proportional to the sustained effort put into to maintaining a way of thinking that is helpful.
I often wonder when people refer to pessimism, realism and optimism, where is the sweet spot? I guess it depends on what you are measuring, but its looking like being slightly more optimistic than realistic has some advantages, as long as you are not delusional about what it takes for the desired achievement
Daedalus- Re: “that is counter-intuitive”
Thats an interesting take on the phrase. I have not noticed that people use the phrase in that way… to imply a fault in reality versus a fault in their thinking. I wish that there were a better phrase for this, because intuition is used in multiple ways, sometimes implying a lack of thinking/logic altogether.
Years ago when I encountered the “Monty Hall problem,” I had difficulty accepting the correct probabilities because it was “counter intuitive.” My initial response was resistance, but then spent some time thinking about the puzzle in various ways. Now I cannot remember why it took so long to realize my error in thinking.
SARA-
What you wrote reminds me of when I quit smoking a few years ago. I was amazed at how many ‘cues’ there were for me to have a smoke– have coffee-have smoke, take a walk- have a smoke, eat food- have a smoke,…
At one point I thought there was an alarm in my head that went off every 55 minutes– time for a smoke! (I decided I really didn’t need it and it stopped going off. Strange.)
At this point I don’t have any idea why I would smoke or why I started or any of that. Apparently all the sleds and hills are gone.
But getting here was a bit more complicated than “Yes I can,” that’s for sure.
Cc, I think that people usually treat intuition as a black-box method of feeling that something is a certain way. They don’t have access to individual steps in the problem analysis, so those steps can’t be analyzed for accuracy. Usually people trust their own intuition and who ever else has the same intuition outcome. Unless you can test that intuition some way, you can’t know for sure.
To use an analogy, to me “intuition” is like the non-algorithmic process of estimating which collection is bigger. Many organisms can look at a collection of objects and qualitatively decide which group is bigger. When the two groups are of similar size, the error rate goes way up. Animals and humans that don’t know how to count can only compare relative numbers of things this way. Humans who have learned the counting algorithm, can use the counting algorithm to know the precise number of objects in each group and compare them with complete accuracy. For large groups, the counting algorithm can take a long time. The non-algorithmic estimating method and the counting algorithm are two ways of arriving at nearly the same thing, but there is a trade-off of precision for computational overhead and time.
If you know enough about a subject, you can use the cognition algorithm to decide which facts are relevant, acquire those facts, manipulate those facts with logic and arrive at a conclusion which can be checked because each step in the decision process is known and can be checked. If you don’t know enough, then you can’t, and are left with using a non-algorithmic intuition process that you feel is right. But you can’t check it because the individual steps are not separable from the result.
Like the estimation method, an intuitive method of decision making trades off speed, accuracy, data requirements and computational overhead. The person who implements the counting algorithm, knows that the answer they got is correct. The person implementing the estimation method can’t know that it is correct except in extreme cases. The same is true of intuition vs cognitive decision making.
ccbowers- I like the Monty Hall Problem as an example of a classic counter-intuitive problem. I wrestled with it for a couple of hours until it dawned on me where my ‘gut’ was going wrong. Over the years since,I have posed it to many people,and almost everyone gets tripped up on it,no matter how smart they are,except for one person.He was a telecommunications instructor that I was taking a class from.I knew he like puzzles,and I came into class one morning and told it to him,and he immediately gave the right answer.I was a bit taken aback by his quick insight,and asked him how he knew,and he said “I took statistics in college.It was fairly obvious”. Math…who knew?
tmac,
The biggest problem with the Monty Hall Problem is that no one ever seems to state it correctly.
Discussions about the counter-intuitive nature of the solution to the Monty Hall problem are nearly always subsumed by endless disagreements resulting from the fact that the problem was not stated clearly and accurately by the person introducing it.
BillyJoe7- What do you see as being misstated? What would be the correct way to pose it? Sorry if this is OT.