Confessions, frustrations of a lifelong Dolphins fan who grew up to cover the team

Scientific research proves positive feedback and thinking is more effective for learning than negative feedback and thinking. There's in fact a study that shows a physiological difference of increased in testosterone for male athletes when given positive feedback over negative. As far as game outcome and individual performance are concerned . . . random chance plays a role in everything we do and all is bound for regression to the mean.

 

I think there might be some confusion about ‘positive’ and ‘negative’m
In psychology/training ‘positive’ doesn’t mean thinking about puppies and rainbows and cinnamon cookies. ‘Positive’ means taking an action and ‘negative’ means not doing/avoiding an action.

One study conducted by the Australian army concluded training soldiers to ‘stay alive’ is more effective than training them ‘don’t get killed’. One method id positive i.e. achieving a goal and the other is negative i.e. not doing something. The difference in terminology may seem like semantics but it is a powerful and real difference.

 

Complete and utter bull****. One of the more rigorous areas of psychology is conditioning research where you can put animals in controlled environments and see what kinds of stimuli increase or decrease rates of learning. And one of the most effective forms of conditioning is conditioning to an aversive stimulus.

Try it out yourself. Take an animal, put it in a neutral environment, then shock it really hard and see how long it takes for that animal to learn not to go to that environment. You know.. this kind of learning is really useful in the real world. A lot of animals (and humans) wouldn't survive if they didn't learn to avoid stimuli that cause pain or injury fast enough!

Having said that, you can elicit fast rates of learning using both positive and negative reinforcers. So it's not like negative reinforcers always elicit faster rates of learning. But to say that somehow psychology has proven positive feedback is better for learning than negative feedback is.. well like I said utter bull****.

Not the right way to think about it. "Positive feedback" just means whatever mechanism elicited a response R to a stimulus S is more likely to elicit that same response to that same stimulus after receiving "positive feedback". Negative feedback is the opposite: the S-R association decreases in strength so that R is less likely to occur after S after receiving negative feedback.

Anyway.. let's be clear about something: conditioning research as I said is one of the more rigorous areas of psychology (the other area is probably the study of the early stages of human/animal sensory processing), but once you get past simple associative learning (an animal/human learning stimulus B comes after stimulus A) and go into stuff that involves cognition, the rigor starts to break down and you really have to start interpreting research papers as "case studies" more than demonstrations of a general and rigorously formulated rule.

In other words, psychology just isn't advanced enough to answer questions like what kind of motivations for what kind of people in what kind of environments and for what kinds of tasks tend to be most effective (and the concept of "effective" also varies from situation to situation.. do we mean fastest rate of learning, slowest rate of extinction, highest asymptote for a learning curve, etc..). That's why I only pointed out what D'Wade said was utter bull****.. I didn't go farther than that and say negative feedback is always better.

 

C-brad... I wished I owned a football team, you would head my analytics Dept in a heartbeat..

You are a leader in this new age of analytics as far as what I’ve read from differing opinions..

What a mind..

 

People are definitely not on the same page for this topic and talking about different areas of reinforcement psychology.

 

Tom Brady and the Patriots reinforcement psychology ----- 8 superbowls in 17 years

 

8 Super Bowls in 17 CHEATING seasons.


---Fixed

 

This. That is how I took D-Wade's outlook. You are focusing on what you can control. And there have been a few studies on locus of control--especially in the workplace, and they all say the same general thing. The more you think you can control your surroundings, the better your outlook and mood.

That is the whole point. Bad things are going to happen. How do you react? Do you positively react by learning from the bad thing, and working harder and smarter? Or do you get down and stay there, changing nothing, complaining about the world around you.

I think both sides are saying the same general thing here. But, hey, I tend to believe the best in people.

 

People suck