Midterm Readings Flashcards
What is abstract thinking?
‘The big picture’ - Focuses on why you are doing something
- When people do this, they are more connected to their long term goals, less impulsive, less vulnerable to temptation and more likely to plan their actions in advance
What is concrete thinking?
‘The nitty-gritty’ - You think about your behavior in terms of what you are doing
- Thinking this way is really useful when you need to do something that is difficult, unfamiliar, complex, or just takes a lot of time to learn.
What is desirability thinking?
whether or not taking that action or achieving that goal will result in good things for you. (When we consider doing something in the more distant future)
- WHY thinking
What is feasibility information?
whether or not you can actually do whatever needs to be done (When we considering doing something in the near future)
- WHAT thinking
What is the expectancy value theory?
people are motivated to do anything as a function of (1) how likely they are to be successful (expectancy) and (2) how much they think they will benefit from it (value)
When do you think about your goals in why vs what terms?
Why terms: when you want to get energized, stay motivated, or avoid temptations
What terms: when you are dealing with something particularly difficult, unfamiliar, or anything that takes a long time to learn.
What is the inverse effort rule?
if you have to work hard at something, you aren’t good at it
What is goal contagion?
seeing someone else pursue a goal makes you more likely to pursue it yourself
What are the two types of goals?
Be good: Performance goal - to show that you’re smart, and outperform others
Do better: Mastery of goals - care about the progress and less about the performance
What is the difference between autonomous and expedient help?
Autonomous help: Promotes understanding and learning to eventually do it on your own
Expedient help: Want someone to do the work for you
What are the two types of goal focus?
Promotion: achievement/accomplishment, maximizing gains (and avoiding missed opportunities)
Prevention: safety vs danger, minimize losses (hanging on to what you got)
Explain the difference in rewards/punishments with promotion vs prevention
Promotion: showering praise for doing right and withholding love for failure
- Prevention: punishing for doing something wrong and nothing for doing something right
Explain eastern and western culture differences in goal promotion
- Western - promotion goal
- Eastern (interdependence) - prevention
Explain the difference in thinking positive with promotion vs prevention
Promotion - Gain (high value of success)
Prevention - safety (don’t need to win)
Explain the difference in picking courses with promotion vs prevention
Promotion: picking on expected grade Prevention: picking on value of class more than expected grade
Explain the difference in moods of reaching goals with promotion vs prevention
- Happy for promotion
- Relaxed for prevention (much more low energy, just as rewarding though)
Explain the difference when something bad happens with promotion vs prevention
Prevention - danger (anxiety - high energy)
Promotion - sadness (low energy)
Explain the difference in work habits with promotion vs prevention
Promotion - more creative (more time brainstorming)
- Good at connecting themes/ synthesizing info
Prevention focus is concrete (pick a route and go)
- Better memory and Great with detail
Explain the difference when getting rejected with promotion vs prevention
EXPLICIT: Prevention focus - loss
- regret/anxiety
IGNORED: Promotion focus - sad
- More likely to try to re-engage and try new strategies
Explain the difference in role models with promotion vs prevention
- Prevention - inspired by negative role model
- Promotion: inspired by positive role model
What are admirable goals?
Goals that make our inner lives richer, enhancing our own sense of self-worth instead of leaving us to seek worth and validation in the eyes of others
Why do we pursue external, superficial goals?
- we tend to believe they will make us happy
- when our needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence aren’t met
What is authentic happiness?
refers to that we find the greatest motivation and most personal satisfaction from those goals that we choose for ourselves
What are autonomy supportive situations?
refer to situations where people are given choices, or even just the illusion of choices
When is it ok to use rewards?
- When rewards are unexpected (that aren’t contingent on performance)
- Verbal rewards, like saying good job
What is internalization?
when people take externally based rules and requests and come to personally endorse them as values
When is internalization facilitated?
- our basic needs are supported (relatedness, competence, autonomy)
When are feelings of relatedness and competence greatly enhanced?
when we are able to understand the rationale behind the value
What can intrinsic motivation be destroyed by?
control rewards punishment deadlines excessive monitoring obligation in general
What goal do you choose: when it’s easy?
Be good goal
What goal do you choose: when you can’t get motivated?
Thinking in abstract terms (WHY)
When a goal is hard or unfamiliar what do you do?
Be specific about what you want to achieve
When you are tempted, what do you do?
Think about your goal in why terms
What goal do you choose: when you need speed?
Promotion-focused
What goal do you choose: when you need accuracy?
prevention-focused
What goal do you choose: when you want to be creative?
Promotion-focused
What goal do you choose: when you want to have fun?
choose getting-better goals, along with autonomous self chosen goals
What goal do you choose: When you want real lasting happiness?
choose goals that satisfy your basic need for relatedness, competence, and autonomy
In terms of motivating goals, what is the direct approach?
- Simply telling someone what his goal should be
- Can be problematic, but is unavoidable, so you need to do it in a way that promotes acceptance
What are Strategies for increasing goal acceptance?
- giving them a sense of personal control
- creating contracts
- Contracts = explicit commitments to engage in particular goal-directed behaviours. Promises made publicly
What are the ways in which we can persuade someone to do a goal?
- direct approach
- using cues
- framing
- goal contagion
What is framing?
presenting participants with a task and then talking about it in a way that elicits a particular goal
What kind of intervention is goal contagion?
getting-better intervention
How can we use goal contagion on children, students, or employees for them to pursue certain goals?
by finding role models
What is goal shielding?
Protecting goals from distractions, temptations, and competing goals
When competing goals are activated, the brain responds by inhibiting one of them (goal shield)
What is underregulation?
- Not doing enough of something you need to do for success
- Missing opportunities, not self-monitoring
What is misregulation?
Choosing an ineffective strategy to reach your goal
- What to do: make sure you are self-monitoring
What are strategies that we can use to limit the need of self-control when we find it is lacking?
1) Keep need for self control at minimum (stop before you start)
2) Remember why thinking and self-monitoring for fighting temptation
3) Don’t pursue 2 goals at once that both require a lot of self-control
4) Pay yourself in incentives
Explain the differences between pessimists and optimists and failing
Pessimists think about how they could have succeeded if they had done things differently
- useful for future performance, because it allows you to be better prepared for what will happen next time.
Optimists tend to think about how they could have screwed things up even more
- serves only one purpose—to make you feel better about failing.
- Does Not help you to improve/reach goal
What is unrealistic optimism?
total unwillingness to look the objective facts of reality in the face
- a confidence in things you can’t actually control
What is grit?
Combination of long term commitment and persistence
Explain the difference in culture when thinking about succeeding/failing at our goals
Western societies → emphasis on measuring and celebrating ability
East Asia → emphasize the importance of effort
How do you properly disengage from a goal?
- decide if giving up is really what’s best for you
- find a goal to replace it
What goals naturally enhance your grit?
Getting better goals
Autonomously chosen goals
What are the 5 rules for positive feedback?
- be sincere and specific
- Emphasize behaviours under the person’s control
- avoid comparisons
- do not undermine autonomy
- attainable standards and expectations
What is naive practice?
doing something repeatedly and expecting that repetition alone will improve performance
What is purposeful practice?
‘purposeful’, thoughtful and focused than naive practice, comes with specific characteristics:
- well-defined goals
- focused
- involves feedback
- getting out of comfort zone
What does “getting out of your comfort zone” mean?
Getting out of comfort zone means doing something you wouldnt before (finding ways around barriers, “try differently” vs “try harder”
What is the key difference between traditional and deliberate practice?
Traditional: not designed to challenge homeostasis - learning is about fulfilling your innate potential and develop a skill without getting far from comfort zone
Deliberate: goal is not only to reach your potential but to build it ! Make things possible that were not possible before !
What is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability?
the amount of time spent analyzing positions—not the amount of time spent playing chess with others
What is a mental representation?
a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about
What are the two features of mental representations? (in regards to chess)
- Lets players get a sense of which side has the advantage
- Allows to zero in on individual pieces and mentally move them around the board
What is the thing that all mental representations have in common?
they make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short term memory
What is the best way to understand exactly what mental representations are and how they work?
developing a good mental representation of the concept mental representation
What is the difference between deliberate and purposeful practice?
Deliberate practice requires a lot more information
What two things does deliberate practice require?
- a well-developed field
- a teacher that will help student improve
What are the similarities of fields such as classical music, mathematics, ballet?
- they can all be evaluated objectively
- all competitive, therefore incentive to train
- fields are well established in the goals of individuals
- experts have become teachers
What are the specific traits of deliberate practice?
- A field where people have already figured out how to improve
- Requires almost maximal effort
- Includes well-defined and specific goals
- Requires full attention and conscious action
- Requires feedback and response
- Requires deliberate mental representations
- Requires building and modifying known skills
What was The Top Gun Approach to Improvement?
They just set up a program that mimicked the situations pilots would face in real dogfights and that allowed the pilots to practice their skills repeatedly with plenty of feedback and without the usual costs of failure
What is the main problem that radiologists face in regards to improving?
the difficulty in getting effective feedback on their diagnoses
When is an experienced teacher especially useful?
especially useful in the early stages while forming MR foundations
What is the most important thing that teachers do?
help you develop your own MRs to monitor and correct your own performance
What are The 3 Fs (to effectively practice a skill without a teacher)?
Focus: Break the skill down into components you can repeat and analyze properly
Feedback: Determine your weaknesses
Fix it: Figure out ways to address your weaknesses and improve
What is the best way to get past a plateau?
Challenge yourself even more
or cross-train in the first place so you never hit plateaus thanks to more variety
How do you weaken your reasons to stop?
- good planning
- good sleep
- limit practice to 1 hour
How do you strengthen your reasons to keep going?
- Strengthen your desire
- believe that you can succeed
- social motivation
- Set things up to be constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement
Explain stage 1 of an expert’s development - STARTING OUT
Introduction in a playful way
- Crucial role of parents (encourage curiosity and educational activities)
- Influence of older siblings as inspiration
- Children come up with “part play, part training” activities
Explain stage 2 of expert development: BECOMING SERIOUS
- Begin to take lessons from a coach (who are not experts, but who work well with children)
- Role of parents: help establish routine, praise, push prioritization
- Motivation comes from the child (or it won’t last)
- Eventually, students become self-motivated
- Longer practice times
- Start to identify with activity
Explain stage 3 of expert development: COMMITMENT
- Major commitment towards activity
- will seek out best coaches
- doing as much as possible to improve
- Motivation lies solely on the student, but family may still play an important support role
Explain stage 4 of expert development: PATHBREAKERS
- Experts who move beyond existing knowledge in their fields (they make unique contributions to it)
- they used their OWN creativity
What are pathbreakers?
Pathbreakers (in any field) are creative geniuses who come up with their own innovations in a slow and long process
What are anti-prodigies?
people born without any talent in a specific field
Explain the UBC physics class deliberate practice road map
- Identify what students should learn how to do (skills not knowledge)
- Examine how experts learn a skill → teach that to students
- Teach skill step by step, out of comfort zone but not too far
- Give plenty of repetition & feedback
What is Homo exercens?
Species that takes control of its life thru practice
