The illusion of reward and punishment: A mathematical analysis
The Economics Nobel prize of 2002 was particularly notable as an Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, was awarded the most prestigious award for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, despite all the great research generated by economists. One of his experiences and his amazing explanation forms the basis of today’s writing.
In the mid 1960s, Kahneman, then a junior phycology professor at Hebrew University, once was convinced to lecture a group of Israeli air force flight instructors on the conventional wisdom of behavioral modification and it’s application to the psychology of flight training. Kahneman’s point was rewarding positive behavior works but punishing mistakes does not. Aside from being a very well studied topic, proved over and over again, the effectiveness of reward vs punishment is often a contest where winner is contradictory to our intuition and experience. Reward always works better, no matter how less seemingly it might be, simply because it’s easier to understand from point of view of primal senses. Ask any pet owners, they will agree.
During the lecture, as we can guess, one of the flight instructors interrupted, “I’ve often praised people warmly for beautifully executed maneuvers, and the next time they always do worse”. He continued, “And I’ve screamed at people for badly executed maneuvers and by and large the next time they improve. Don’t tell me that reward works and punishment doesn’t work. My experience contradicts it.” The other flight instructors agreed and, to Kahneman, the flight instructors’ experience rang true. But, on the other hand, the model of reward being effective and punishment not being effective is a well studied theory, demonstrated by experiments on animals. He ruminated on this apparent paradox. And then it stuck him: the screaming proceeded the improvements, but contrary to appearances, it didn’t cause it.
The answer lies in the phenomenon known as, “Regression towards the mean”. In any series of events an extraordinary event is more likely to be followed by a more ordinary one, purely due to chance.
The student pilots had a certain personal ability to fly fighter planes. Raising their skill requires rigorous practice and lots of other factors were involved in it. However, the chances that there will be a noticeable performance improvement from one maneuver to the next one is minimal. Any specially good or significantly bad performance was thus mostly a matter of luck. So, if a pilot made an exceptionally good landing — one far above his normal level performance — then the odds would be good that he would perform closer to his norm — that is, worse — the next day. So, good words would appear to be wasted on him. On the contrary, the pilot made an exceptionally bad landing — running the plane off the end of the runway almost crashing the kitchen in charge of cooking commander’s clam chowder — then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm — that is, better. So, shouting ‘you clumsy ape’ would appear to be effective in bringing out the best out of a pilot; where, perhaps, it was just regression towards a pilot’s average performance.
In reality, we stumbled upon just another case of ‘Correlation does not imply causation’. In this illusion of: students performs well, praise does no good; student performs poorly, instructor compares student to lower primate in high volume, student improves; what we actually see is randomness in action in our daily life and yet another case of regression towards the mean!
Hope this random read was enjoyable.