This week’s book learning is from ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman.
Daniel Kahneman was amidst giving the Israeli flight cadet instructors a passionate speech about ‘right methods’ of training. His thesis revolved around the theory that rewarding good performance works better than punishing mistakes.
Hearing this, a seasoned instructor stood up and said “I find the reality to be precisely the opposite. When I praise a cadet for flawless execution of a manoeuvre, it’s always worse the next time while a yelling at poor performance always results in better performance. So, yelling gets better results!”
Kahneman recognized immediately that he was right and, at the same time, very very wrong.
The instructor had just pointed out a very basic statistical concept – Regression to the mean i.e. inevitable fluctuations to a process! Essentially, if a cadet executed a near flawless manoeuvre in the first attempt, the second was likely to be worse, and vice versa! The ‘feedback’ changed very little..
I found this to be an amazing insight. As Kahneman shows from time to time in his book, we human beings have a habit of trying to find patterns where (often) none exist!
Here’s to examining ‘regression to the mean’ when evaluating performances this week!
A Learning a Day 