Introduction
Experience is the basic knowledge that we constantly rely on in our lives**. The problem is that experience is not always reliable. Unreliable lessons learned from experience are often difficult to eliminate or amend, as they tend to be further consolidated and reinforced with experience.
But that's not to say to ignore experience. As policymakers, it is better to think of lessons learned as hypotheses to be tested, rather than as conclusions that are absolutely unchallengeable. Only then can we hope to learn from experiences effectively, unshackle from old ones, and relearn new ones.
Most people do, because these personal experiences shape our preferences, nurture our intuition, and guide us to critical decisions. Experience is a valuable teacher, and the lessons we learn from experience may stay with us for the rest of our lives. On the whole, our society also highly values experience, which is reflected in the fact that doctors, judges, politicians and managers who provide services to society are required to have a wealth of experience, and the more experienced the better.
That's great, but what's wrong?
The problem is that experience is not always reliable, and unfortunately, we firmly believe that experience will always be reliable.
Experience itself is a complex concept, but in a nutshell, experience consists of the following specific contents and qualities:
Experience is a process. It is our moment-to-moment interaction with our current environment. We observe and participate in events, sometimes both at the same time. We'll have a rock 'n' roll session or a ski trip. If we run a business, then when designing stores, **, and mobile phones, we focus on optimizing the customer and user experience.
Experience is also a product. It is built on the basis of our countless interactions in the past, accumulated over a long period of time. We gain experience by practicing or participating in a task multiple times. Because we value lessons learned, we emphasize that it's important to hire people with a certain level of experience because we want them to be able to do the job they need to do.
The experience is also personalized. When we try something new, we need to rely on experience to judge whether we like it or not. Based on this judgment, future decisions and behaviors are then planned. Experience also plays a key role in shaping taste, for example, most Americans love baseball, while many Britons love cricket, but most Turks or Spaniards, don't pay attention to either game at all. Often, our experience will determine what games or books we like, and what particular food we will enjoy.
At the end of the day, experience is the basic knowledge that we constantly rely on in our lives**. When we have to make trade-offs, we welcome them, and even have some experience, so that we can understand the situation and make decisions and act based on our preferences and goals.
Fortunately, there are many benefits to learning from experience:
It is an automatic process. We rarely think about how to learn from experience, it happens naturally. Many animals, like humans, are naturally able to experience the conditions, patterns, risks, and rewards of their surroundings.
It's very fast. For the various situations we have to face on a daily basis, experience can quickly strengthen an individual's intuition, sixth sense, and subconscious cognition. Even a simple encounter is enough to form an opinion that, in many cases, can help us deal more effectively with life's unexpected situations.
It boosts confidence. Experiences give us an understanding of the realities in which we are and help us build the confidence and confidence to participate in them. By gaining more experience, we believe that we will become more capable.
It is enduring. Many of the skills we learn from experience will eventually become second nature to us, and they will stay with us for a long time, even if they are forgotten for a while, and it is easy to pick them up again. The persistence of experience frees up time and energy for us to learn other skills.
As a simple example, cycling, is a typical skill that most people can learn from experience. If you can ride, you must have learned it in practice, and no one can learn to ride by reading a book or reading **. It doesn't take hundreds of hours for us to learn to ride a bike, and the more we ride, the more we feel an increase in control and proficiency. You don't need to think about what you're doing or how you need to ride it, but it's also hard to explain the ride experience to someone who's never ridden a bike before. The latter had to be ridden once on his own to be able to understand. Even if you haven't ridden a bike in a while, you'll be able to get started with it again in no time. The same goes for many other skills, such as driving, typing, skiing, or doing surgery.
As a result, a wealth of experience can turn a skill into a specialty, and reliable feedback, coupled with hard practice, can help people to continuously refine their skills in many complex tasks.
Many psychologists see the process of learning from experience as a cyclical process. We first experience, then reflect, produce abstract experiences, and finally try to put those experiences into practice. Practice leads to more experience, and then a new learning cycle begins.
This cycle is the main part of understanding cause and effect. We make certain decisions and observe the decisions made by others, and then discover the connections and consequences in them. We then use these insights to revise our decisions and increase our chances of achieving the desired outcome.
We can also learn from the experiences of others. While these experiences are often not as vivid as the ones we have first-hand, they can just as guide us in shaping our own abilities.
For all these reasons, experience can be a powerful teacher as we form intuition and make decisions in all aspects of life. It can help us adapt to new circumstances, optimize our performance, and help us survive difficult situations.
However, behind all these advantages, there is a dark side to it. Experience can also deceive and mislead us without us realizing it.
Because experience is personal, automatic, fast, exhilarating, and long-lasting, it's hard to ignore it. Concepts that experience instills in our intuition naturally make people feel reliable and credible. Unfortunately, the same is true when experience teaches us the wrong lessons.
There is a default pattern in the human mind that assumes that our experience is a clear and complete reflection of the reality we face. Whatever we learn through observation and engagement seems to be taken by the brain as a fact by default. Psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls the syndrome wysiati, or what you see is all there is.
This assumption, in general, is valid for skill-based activities such as cycling and tennis. These activities involve a benign learning environment in which decision-makers receive massive, immediate, and accurate feedback on actions, and the rules of the game remain largely unchanged.
In these controlled and constrained environments, the perception given by experience is often reliable.
However, modern life is rarely like a bicycle or tennis. In real life, what we see is not necessarily everything.
We are mostly faced with a hostile learning environment, and our experience is constantly filtered and distorted in various ways. As in Plato's famous allegory of the cave, in many relevant contexts we may only observe some vague representation of what actually happened. While experience still leads to learning outcomes, there is no guarantee that lessons from experience will accurately represent real-world situations.
In fact, as sociologist and organizational behavior scholar James March argues in his book The Ambiguities of Experience, we often fail to learn the right lessons from experience when evidence is problematic or contains a lot of irrelevant details. We are also easily swayed by subjective interpretations and tend to draw arbitrary conclusions based on limited information. In this case, more experience reinforces misguided beliefs and creates the illusion that we are getting wiser.
Therefore, the ability to question and adapt lessons learned in a timely manner becomes critical, especially in complex situations where we really need to make informed decisions. Therefore, when encountering a hostile learning environment, we need to ask two key questions that are worth asking:
If I wish to fully understand what is happening, is there something important missing from my experience?
What are some irrelevant details in my experience that need to be overlooked to avoid distracting me from what's happening?
The reverse is also true: what we are able to see, that shapes our experience and the conclusions we draw from it, even if what we see may have nothing to do with the results obtained.
Unreliable lessons learned from experience are often difficult to eliminate or amend, as they tend to be further consolidated and reinforced with experience. That's why, even though our surroundings have changed, we find ourselves unable to make appropriate adjustments to the new reality due to the experience of history.
Destin Sandlin, creator of the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day, tested the concept with an unusual experiment. He reverses the way the bike's handlebars operate, and when you turn the handlebars to the left, the wheels turn to the right and vice versa. He then asked those who could easily ride a normal bike to try riding the "reverse bike" he had created and ride a few feet.
How hard is it to travel a few feet on a reverse bike? Experiments have proved to be very difficult. Because people are so used to normal bikes that they simply can't adapt to this new situation.
Impressively, after a lot of practice, experience, and trial and error, Sanderlin eventually learned to ride this weird bike. But then he found that he couldn't ride a normal bike anymore. This experiment conclusively proved that the experience of riding a normal bike gave the wrong trick for riding a reverse bike and vice versa.
If you don't want to make a mess of your bike, try turning your computer's keyboard upside down and doing a similar experiment. Try typing your name after the keyboard is upside down, and you'll find your fingers wandering awkwardly over the keys, because when you reflexively look for the corresponding letters in familiar places, you'll realize in frustration that they're not there.
These two simple experiments prove that experience can bind us and predispose us to specific choices, processes, or actions, even if they have become obsolete or irrelevant. Part of the reason for this is that it's hard to break free from old experiences and relearn new rules.
In fact, for centuries, humanity arrogantly believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. We simply assume that what we see must be the truth. And the filter of experience constantly confirms and reinforces this false belief that the earth is flat and that everything revolves around it. In order to break free from this experience, we have had to develop methods and techniques that allow us to go beyond the old experience and grasp the reality of the reality that the Earth is not actually the center of the universe, but only a small part of a larger cosmic system. If we can't properly assess where we actually are, we will stay on the wrong knowledge and stop there. This knowledge comes from experience and tends to be further reinforced by more experience.
The good news is that with the right tools, we can avoid or escape the pitfalls of this experience. This is essential for humanity to drive progress in important areas such as medicine, science and technology, education, politics, economics and business. The bad news is that unless we can admit that experience can occasionally be a terrible teacher, we can still fall into the trap of experience, even if there is plenty of evidence that the lessons of experience are wrong.
Experience is always a great teacher, which in itself is a fallacy. When we (the two authors) first met about 15 years ago, our research goal was to look at positive examples of how experiences can help people learn valuable insights and make better decisions. However, as time goes on, we begin to notice that in many situations, more experiences not only do not simplify the facts, but rather complicate things without people realizing it.
The late Hillel Einhorn, one of the founders of behavioral decision theory, once asked, "If we believe in the fact that we can learn from experience, can we be aware of the fact that we cannot learn from experience either"?
In today's controversial world, there is a lot of debate about when and how to challenge accepted wisdom, whether it's academic and scientific experts, political and social "elites," or powerful journalistic ** institutions. Building on the questions raised by Enhong, we believe that the wisdom that emerges from experience should be subject to a similar rigorous and deliberate scrutiny. After all, self-deception is just as bad as being deceived by others, and it is often more difficult to overcome.
We are not saying to ignore experience. But a timely and healthy skepticism of our own experience will allow us to discern when experience is reliable and when it is not. As policymakers, it is better to think of lessons learned as hypotheses to be tested, rather than as conclusions that are absolutely unchallengeable. Only then can we hope to learn from experiences effectively, unshackle from old ones, and relearn new ones.
By Emre Soyer, behavioral scientist and entrepreneur; Robin MRobin M. HoggsHogarth), founder of the field of judgement and decision-making research, Professor Emeritus at the Université Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
*: Experience: Why We Learn Wrong Lessons and How to Correct Them, China Youth Publishing House.