"How can you perform this badly ?"
Ram had no response.
"You are going to fail for sure. I am going to call your parents"
"Sorry miss"
"Next is Imran. You did surprisingly good. Well done. Keep it up"
Imran looked happy.
The midterm came. The teacher had mixed feeling about the performance of his students. Ram has improved his performance. However, Imran did not perform similar to the previous exam. He discussed this with a senior teacher and got a strong reply
"Never give them your appreciation. Keep it to yourself. If you pat on their back they will get carried away and lose focus."
"But you were right to scold Ram. If it is not for your insult he would not have scored more this time. But don’t forget, never show them you are happy with their performance".
🐸Frog in a pond
I have been on both sides of this story. My biology teacher’s strategy for a class quiz was to beating every student in the classroom. She will give a blow whenever you answer wrongly. If you answer correctly she will continue asking questions. I was the last man standing. It went on for a good ten minutes. And finally, I caved. And received my beating with the cane.
What do you feel about this story? Another question. Do you believe in negative or positive reinforcement?
For the second question, my answer was always positive reinforcement. But did I believe it, or am I practising it? Hardly. The reason is the answer to the first question. Our experiences tend to agree with the senior teacher’s opinion.
Most of our praise comes with conditions. You did well! I hope you will keep it up (in other words “don’t f**k it up next time”). Whenever I get some good grades, my father used to say you are a frog in a small pond. Since the pond is small you think you are the king. But in a larger pond, you are still a small frog! We always feel that our praise will get into their head and they will do it worse the next time. And it happens. In the next attempt the person we praised, will perform a bit worse and immediately we regret our praise. And you can see many teachers or parents saying that we gave them an earful, and see they are performing better. Our beliefs are validated with personal experiences and our behaviours change forever in favour of negative reinforcement.
📈 Regression to the mean
The fact is that there is hardly any causal reason for their subsequent good or bad performance based on your praise or scolding. The result will be the same if the teacher had not scolded Ram or praised Imran. What the teacher missing is the phenomenon called regression to the mean.
It simply means Ram had a bad day or Imran had an exceptionally good day. These are some rare events in which they differ from their average performance. And their performance on the next task will be closer to their average one. Unfortunately, we try to correlate it with our response and make a belief out of it.
In his book Thinking fast and slow, Daniel Khanaman explains this effect in great detail. The effect of regression on the mean can explain how this happens. But it does not satisfy us since we always look for a reason for this change in performance. The truth is that you or anyone else have not caused this change in performance. It is natural to go to the average consistent behaviour after an unusual one.
Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow (p. 176).
This is difficult to practice. We are so biased to the causal explanations. And we cannot think statistically. That is why our society have more negative reinforcers than otherwise.
💡 it is better not to come to any conclusion based on someone’s single performance. They might be having a bad or particularly good day.
Other random things
I feel I am not giving respect to the newsletter format. Many of my favourite newsletters have things like what I did interesting this week (or last two weeks), or which podcast I listened to. So let me do something similar this time.
📝 I read a beautiful article on the contributions of John von Neumann. In quantum information classes, we used to calculate von Neumann entropy which is the information that can be encoded in a state. This is similar to Shannon’s information entropy. But I never knew that he was one of the first people who used computer simulations for weather prediction and warned about climate change in the 1950s ! It does not stop there. He formulated the framework for the digital computer as well. He was a brilliant mathematician. More importantly, he discovered new methods to apply mathematics to real-life problems.
📚 I finally started reading Atomic Habits. This is one of the most celebrated new age productivity/self-help book. One good initial takeaway from the book is that motivation or willpower is over-rated. These require too much effort and it will not make a sustainable change. You need to change the process than focusing on goals. More on this topic later.
🎙️ I listened to a brilliant podcast by Amit Warma with Josy Joseph about India’s security state. It historically approaches how the Indian police state has evolved and is harmful to the countries prosperity
🎙️I listened to another podcast which is worth mentioning. It about global warming and how important is the personal action. From voting the right candidate to taking public transport, there are alot of thing we can do which will have a positive impact on the climate. Important thing is to be aware of the problem and solution. We need to bring the issue to our dinner table discussions.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in.
#09 Why do we always prefer negative reinforcement
We strongly believe that there is a reason or cause behind everything. The moment India crashed out of the world cup, the stories of the rift in the team or team members indulging in luxury become believable causes. Similarly, when a political party wins in India, people attribute victory to a religious consolidation. We also struggle to distinguish between correlation and causation.
At the same time, our thinking is also influenced by loss aversion bias. For individuals, the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. So when my daughter comes up with a good performance, the fear of her slipping down is far greater than the pleasure of getting the grade. So I feel the urge to caution while congratulating her for the achievement.