The Yerkes-Dodson Law - psychology

Discussion in 'Other psychosomatic news and research' started by Sly Saint, Dec 16, 2022.

  1. Sly Saint

    Sly Saint Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I came across this on Psychology tools.

    https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/performance-and-the-yerkes-dodson-law/

    given that many examples of its use come up on a general google search, I'm assuming that it is taken as 'evidence based' fact in psychology.

    But take a look at it's origins and subsequent 'development':
    https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html
     
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  2. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    As usual, you can substitute stress for exertion and it means the same. As you increase exertion, you get increased performance. Up to a point. Similarly you can increase the number of people who work on a problem and get better performance. Up to a point.

    Have to bring out my economics hat but this is the law of diminishing returns and it's been known for a very long time. It applies in almost all industrial processes and, of course, labor.

    There is no reason to separate physical exertion from mental exertion. Thinking is not free. Thinking of any kind requires energy, including emotions or simply paying attention/being alert. This is the same phenomenon at play. Cognitive exertion requires energy, consumes resources and produces byproducts that must be cleared up.

    Absolutely nothing to do with perfectionism. This is junk.
     
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  3. Peter Trewhitt

    Peter Trewhitt Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    The abstract does not mention that expertise and practice affect the location of this curve on the x-axis and the shape of the curve. Also it is conceivable that circumstances can distort the curve by introducing floor or ceiling effects. Looking at humans in real life situations does not always mean we will see the classic inverted u curve.
     
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  4. Sly Saint

    Sly Saint Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html
     
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  5. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Oh, cringe. They tried to do the medical equivalent of the Laffer curve, which is not a real thing either.

    The law of diminishing returns is generic, it's an observation law. It cannot prescribe the points where the curve rises or falls, as it varies with context and a whole bunch of other factors. It's the same simple idea that goes beyond the notion that 9 women cannot have a baby in a month.

    There is an ideology in economics that is basically the same thing as what's wrong with medicine: supply-side economics, the idea that giving money to rich people trickles down to society. Pretty much everything wrong with medicine boils down to the same thing: ignore demand, prop up supply.

    The Laffer curve is the idea that there is such a precise curve that maximizes tax revenue by finding the sweet spot of tax % where rich people invest but consumer spending remains strong, since giving money to rich people is always at the expense of taxing the poor and you can't tax them too much.

    It's widely known to be nonsense. There is no such thing, as millions of actors dynamically react to the context and change the assumptions or find ways around them. No plan survives contact with reality, especially not with millions of people independently making decisions out of self-interest. And it looks like this is what they tried to do here. Intelligence is about adaptation, not finding rigid universal rules or formulas everyone should adhere to.
     
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  6. bobbler

    bobbler Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959354394044004

    https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMP-03-2013-0085/full/html

    And this one (from someone for NASA): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060017835/downloads/20060017835.pdf

    Is a long doc, but worth a read as it covers in pretty good plain speak a lot of the key topics that bundle under all of this - many of which are highly applicable to here. e.g. 'what is stress' (and the fact it is ill-defined)

     
  7. Woolie

    Woolie Senior Member

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    This is just a bad piece. The Yerkes-Dodson Law does not have anything to say about perfectionism or effort at all. Its about the role of punishment in conditioned learning. Yerkes and Dodson found that mice learned to discriminate a punished from a non-punished behaviour better when the intensity of the punishment was moderate (moderate electric shock), compared to when it was high or very low.

    The relationship they found suggests that there might be an "optimal" level of arousal/motivation that facilitates learning (specifically, operant conditioning), and levels above or below that optimum are less effective for learning.

    Yerkes and Dodson lived a long time ago (1908), so maybe we have to forgive them for torturing mice in what seems like a senseless way. But it still makes me wince.
     
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