Feedback
Clear feedback helps people learn from practice. Many decisions provide delayed or incomplete feedback, especially about alternatives that were never tried, so repeated experience may leave important gaps.
THE IDEA
Feedback
Even practice does not make perfect if people lack good opportunities for learning. Learning is most likely if people get immediate, clear feedback after each try. Suppose you are practicing your golf putting skills on the practice green. If you hit ten balls toward the same hole, it is easy to get a sense of how hard you have to hit the ball. Even the least talented golfers will soon learn to gauge the speed of the green under these circumstances. Suppose instead you are putting the golf balls but you are not getting to see where they stop rolling. In that environment, you could putt all day and never get any better at distance control.
Alas, many of life’s choices are like practicing putting without being able to see where the balls end up, and for one simple reason: the situation is not structured to provide good feedback. For example, we usually get feedback only on the options we select, not the ones we reject. Unless people go out of their way to experiment, they may never learn about alternatives to the familiar ones. If you take the longer route home every night, you may never learn there is a shorter one. Long-term processes rarely provide good feedback. Health risks can develop over years without a clear signal linking a daily choice to a later outcome. When feedback is ineffective, we may benefit from a nudge.
When to use it
Improving a skill like public speaking by recording and reviewing performances.
Making investment decisions by tracking outcomes of both chosen and alternative strategies.
In education, providing students with immediate feedback on quizzes rather than delayed grading.
In business, A/B testing to get feedback on product features.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Golf Putting with vs without Feedback
Seeing where a putt stops helps a golfer adjust the next attempt. Without that result, learning distance control becomes harder because the player cannot directly compare the intended and observed distance.
Longer Route Home
Taking the same route each night gives experience with that route but little direct information about alternatives. Trying another route under comparable conditions can reveal a difference.
Delayed Health Feedback
A health-related choice may have no obvious immediate consequence even when it contributes to a longer-term risk. The feedback problem is the difficulty of connecting actions and outcomes; the absence of a warning signal does not itself cause the outcome.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
In what areas of your life do you lack clear, immediate feedback? How can you create better feedback loops?
How might you experiment more to gain feedback on rejected alternatives?
Consider a long-term goal. What intermediate feedback mechanisms could you set up to track progress?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Nudge The Final Edition (Richard H. Thaler Cass R. Sunstein)