19 JAN 2026 by ideonexus
The Psychology of People Who Don't Care About Professiona...
People who don't obsess over sports often have what psychologists call lower tribal instincts. Their identity isn't as strongly tied to being part of a group. They're more individualistic. They're more likely to say, "I don't need to belong to something bigger to feel complete." And there's actual research on this. A 2019 study found that people with low sports interest showed way less us versus them thinking. translation, they don't automatically hate the other team just because they're not ...Folksonomies: psychology tribalism
Folksonomies: psychology tribalism
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notes16 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Social Media's Variable Rewards Schedule
While there is nothing inherently addictive about smartphones themselves, the true drivers of our attachments to these devices are the hyper-social environments they provide. Thanks to the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, smartphones allow us to carry immense social environments in our pockets through every waking moment of our lives. Though humans have evolved to be social—a key feature to our success as a species—the social structures in which we thrive tend to contai... 1 notes
notes16 APR 2018 by ideonexus
Early Attempts to Replace Teachers with Games
The current push to bring digital games into school is, strictly speaking, not the first, nor even the second time that educators have pushed for individualized instruction via machines. But it is decidedly the most nuanced, humanistic, and thoughtful. The first actually took place in the 1950s and early 1960s, when a small group of educational psychologists proposed doing away with teachers altogether and replacing them with self-paced, preprogrammed instruction on so-called "teaching machin... 1 notes
notes09 FEB 2018 by ideonexus
Bias in Praise VS Punishment and Reversion to the Mean
I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I ha... 1 notes
notesUser Cortesoft has a good analogy for this:
"Flip 100 coins. Take the ones that 'failed' (landed tails) and scold them. Flip them again. Half improved! Praise the ones that got heads the first time. Flip them again. Half got worse :(
"Clearly, scolding is more effective than praising."
(source)
See also Regression Fallacy
25 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Simon Baron-Cohen: Radical Behaviorism
The central idea of Radical Behaviorism—that all behavior can be explained as the result of learned associations between a stimulus and a response, reinforced or extinguished through reward and/or punishment—stems from the early 20th century psychologists B.F. Skinner (at Harvard) and John B. Watson (at John Hopkins). Radical Behaviorism came under public attack when Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (published in 1957) received a critical review by cognitivist-linguist Noam Chomsky in 1959 ... 1 notes
notes13 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Encouraging Insight
When we encourage the evolution of insight, we attack the root cause of opposition. The more we develop our cognitive capacity to manage greater complexity, the more we prevail over the compulsion to oversimplify our problems.
Schwartz put it this way: "The findings suggest that at a moment of insight, a complex set of new connections is being created. These connections have the potential to enhance our mentat resources and overcome the brains resistance to change."
Sounds simple. Just in...Folksonomies: insight
Folksonomies: insight
1 notes
notesInsight requires a relaxed environment free of critical oppression.
26 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Games that Turn Humans into Rats in a Skinner Box
The box also taught us two fundamental lessons, one of which had ramifications that extended far beyond Skinner's experiments. Humans are hardwired to respond to primary reinforcers, just like any other animals. And while primary reinforcers have a diminishing effect once we're satiated, secondary reinforcers, like money or social status, exist outside our biological needs, and these never hit a satiation point. In other words, we are hardwired to seek approval from our peers, and we can neve... 1 notes
notesGames like Farmville and Angry Birds tap into the reward mechanisms in our brains, administering doses of dopamine to us for repetitive tasks.
