Wrote my secrets on a birch bark strip
Today would have been my grandfather's hundredth birthday. I don't tend to think of "About Building" as a ghost poem for him and my grandmother, but I suppose it must be.
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larryhammer linking an article on the potential debunking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, I was reminded of my mother's research in the '70's. It was not a direct forerunner of their study, but it was not totally dissimilar in that she was studying how self-perception interacts with objectively assessed skills, specifically from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. The prevailing assumption had been that when people who believed themselves to be bad at, say, math were shown that they had actually done quite well on a math test, they would accept the new data and do just as well if not better when given the opportunity to re-take the test. Instead, it turned out that in cases where I am bad at math was an essential part of the subject's self-image, they resolved the dissonance by doing worse on the test than they had the first time—failing questions they had originally aced. They couldn't twist reality around to match the inside of their heads, so they sabotaged the inside of their heads to make them match reality. A percentage of subjects did just realize they were better at math than they had believed and did not, effectively, falsify their answers the second time around: there was no dissonance in play. But where there was, it was a whammy.
I was looking for citations when I discovered that my grandfather had actually done some similar work in the '40's, observing the selective recall of completed or unfinished tasks when viewed within a framework of success or failure, i.e., "No sweat, I zipped through that in no time!" vs. "I suck at this! It took forever!"
I am beginning to feel that Tiny Wittgenstein is some kind of family tradition, only expressed, since I am not a psychologist, as a personification rather than a paper.
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larryhammer linking an article on the potential debunking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, I was reminded of my mother's research in the '70's. It was not a direct forerunner of their study, but it was not totally dissimilar in that she was studying how self-perception interacts with objectively assessed skills, specifically from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. The prevailing assumption had been that when people who believed themselves to be bad at, say, math were shown that they had actually done quite well on a math test, they would accept the new data and do just as well if not better when given the opportunity to re-take the test. Instead, it turned out that in cases where I am bad at math was an essential part of the subject's self-image, they resolved the dissonance by doing worse on the test than they had the first time—failing questions they had originally aced. They couldn't twist reality around to match the inside of their heads, so they sabotaged the inside of their heads to make them match reality. A percentage of subjects did just realize they were better at math than they had believed and did not, effectively, falsify their answers the second time around: there was no dissonance in play. But where there was, it was a whammy.I was looking for citations when I discovered that my grandfather had actually done some similar work in the '40's, observing the selective recall of completed or unfinished tasks when viewed within a framework of success or failure, i.e., "No sweat, I zipped through that in no time!" vs. "I suck at this! It took forever!"
I am beginning to feel that Tiny Wittgenstein is some kind of family tradition, only expressed, since I am not a psychologist, as a personification rather than a paper.
no subject
I don't think I have as many negative associations as you with the term or the idea of praise—although your comments are making me think of the ambivalence of it in Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994)—but I agree strongly on the discussion of strengths. I have my problems, but as far as we can tell, I got to skip the entire set of problems that started this thread because I knew from almost the time I was sentient that certain kinds of information were easier for me to process than for most other people and certain kinds of information were more difficult for me to process than for most other people and it made me faster at certain kinds of tasks and slower at others and this situation was presented to me by my parents in that deliberately, successfully neutral language: which did not safeguard me entirely against other children or other adults, but the worst damage to my sense of self-worth was done by grad school and chronic illness, not by the attitudes of my upbringing toward my neurology.
no subject
no subject
Clarification appreciated. How do you distinguish the varieties, then?
no subject
--You can have informative positive commentary, where it happens to be positive but the main focus is on the information contained. Example: talking about how Marissa finds math intuitive in order to talk about what this might be used for, or how others do not find it similarly intuitive so adjusting expectations.
--You can have positive critique, where you're looking to have the other person act on the positive information in particular ways, such as "keep this section, this section is really working."
--You can have praise, where you just want to express the positive thing fairly purely without necessarily needing it to be integrated into an action item related either to another thing or to itself. "This poem is really good" might lead the other person to write more poetry, write more poetry of that type, write more in some form on that topic, etc. But that's not why you're saying it or how you're saying it, you're saying it for the pure joy of "wow, good thing here, I point at it." Which is a good thing to do! They're all good things to do!
And they do overlap. But I think that having some of each kind and not confusing them all for each other works better. It's really nice to hear, "Thank you for making supper, it's very good!" It's also useful to hear, "I really like what you made for supper, can you make it again? and/or incorporate some of the technique from it into other thing you make?" And it's also interesting to have someone say, "I really like this thing you made for supper, can we talk about how you did it? I don't see how it works, and I'd like to." But they're not the same.
When we're talking about how to praise small children, I feel like most of the examples ("You're really good at this!" AND "You must have worked really hard on this!") are the third kind. Hardly any of them go further with the conversation or seem inclined to have another purpose. And so they end up being treated as alternatives to each other with no thought to the other purposes a conversation about this sort of thing could have.
As a small child I got treated as a collaborative partner a lot, and I was encouraged to treat my parents as collaborative partners as well. I did get praised ("You did a great job at the piano recital, sweetie") but I also got the other two kinds of positive commentary, and I think that was great, it gave a positive and useful range of interaction. But also I think that it did more than just straight-up praising effort in the direction of me treating my work as, well, my work. Something I could work on and think about.