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Psychological truths like Skinner vs Pavlov Conditioning

Something I find fascinating is that being consistent (and trustworthy) is less effective than being 80/20% consistent (classical vs operant conditioning) at training dogs where there are contextual/environmental cues at play. It's personally counter-intuitive, but I've seen it work and am convinced (I attribute it to evolutionary mechanisms, my goto in biology).

I'm wondering what other psychology as a science results have solid statistics behind them that I'm unaware of (I'm compsci with a physics/maths background, so it's probably most), and are interesting...

2 comments

spinne

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It sounds counterintuitive at first, but if you think of real world examples, it makes a lot of sense. It's the entire principle that casinos and blind bag toys operate on: you do the requested action (like placing a bet or buying the blind bag), you get something you didn't want or expect, and you get a little mad that it didn't go the way you wanted, so you do the requested action again. When it does end up giving you what you wanted, all the times you did the requested action get reinforced, not just the ones where you got the optimal outcome, like a big, "HAH! I knew I was right, I just needed to keep going until my ship finally came in!"

I don't know what other psychology concepts have similar reliability, but another really interesting one is "diffusion of responsibility" or bystander effect in which the more people witness something terrible, the easier it is for everyone to stand around doing nothing because they assume someone else is taking charge. It's why pointing directly at someone and saying, "You, call 911!" helps.

MalReynolds

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It sounds counterintuitive at first, but if you think of real world examples, it makes a lot of sense. It’s the entire principle that casinos and blind bag toys operate on: you do the requested action (like placing a bet or buying the blind bag), you get something you didn’t want or expect, and you get a little mad that it didn’t go the way you wanted, so you do the requested action again.

Yup, I suspect the lack of consistency, especially for dependant animals and gamblers, drives anxiety, which is disproportionately relieved by a successful outcome, which is a recurring survival driver in the wild (again I blame evolution, where persistence can be rewarded by survival)

“Diffusion of responsibility” is a good one, guessing it's testable.

In that vein, we have the Stanford prison experiment, though it's repeatability seems to be questioned.