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Psychological truths like Skinner vs Pavlov Conditioning (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 months ago by MalReynolds@slrpnk.net to c/science@lemmy.ml

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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...

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[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago

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.