Self-Regulatory Learning

A simple idea from David Epstein's blog which could have great benefits in our lives. I think, I have been doing this for past two decades and I can vouch for this method.  

ES: Self-regulatory learning — basically thinking about your thinking. I’ve seen this in a number of domains, but was just reading a relevant study of cardiac procedures at hospitals. To simplify it: in some instances, hospital staff just racked up experience doing procedures; in others, they got some experience doing procedures, but then also had some time to reflect on and try to articulate what they had actually learned from the experience — whether it went well or poorly. This whole literature on self-regulatory learning, to me, gets at some of the challenge of learning from experience if we leave it up to intuition. It turns out that doing this explicit reflection on lessons is a powerful learning aid, but it’s also not something we intuitively feel we need to do. In the hospital study, the groups that had some experience and some reflection time performed better than the groups that had more procedural experience but no reflection time. That seems like a big deal to me.

RH: Oh, I like that idea. Because there are two ways of learning from experience. One is automatic and it doesn't take any effort on your part, and the other requires effort. And if you just leave it to no effort and rely on what you pick up, you'll pick up strange things. And therefore, what is very helpful is if you actually have to analyze some of these issues and understand why you've learned one thing as opposed to anything else. So I think the general idea of sacrificing, as it were, some experience for some thinking time is really important.

ES: I know I’ve repeated this point, but usually if we just learn from a success or failure, you will think you’re learning and you’ll keep doing something. And you may be blind to what causes the difference. If you stop and think about it, and try an experiment, you will not need as much experience. But, as Robin said, our instinct is thoughtless learning, to just double your efforts doing the same thing over and over. People like the warm feeling of learning from experience and continuing, but sometimes it’s just a feeling and they like that rather than stopping and reflecting on it a bit. 

RH: Also, the thing you're learning is how to design a better experiment the next time around. So taking time out, to not only experience things but spend that time analyzing and designing experiments is important. And it’s one of the things that we're not very good at — teaching people how to be experimenters, how to actually design experiments in the real world.  

DE: Given that peoples’ lives aren’t in labs and can’t conform to the formal scientific method, what do you think we can take to get just a little bit better in our own experiments? Maybe trying to isolate particular variables when we experiment so we have a better chance at understanding causality? 

RH: Having awareness of different hypotheses is probably the key. This can be done in real life interaction with people. You do experiments with your own family just by interacting with them. You don't necessarily analyze them as experiments, but you can have hypotheses. 

DE: You mean about why they behave the way they do or react to you or to some activity a certain way?

RH: Right.