Why is it that some folks keep on making the same mistakes?
Your Back Page scribbler is happy to make mistakes – we consider them to be great learning exercises.
What we assiduously try to avoid, however, is making the same mistake twice.
So it is a source of intrigue when we encounter the actions of some of our fellow travellers who appear hell-bent on not learning from their errors and persist in doing stuff they realise is going to be harmful, but go ahead and do it anyway.
It’s a phenomenon that has piqued the interest of researchers at the University of NSW, prompting a team of boffins there to take a deep dive into the science of self-sabotaging behaviour. They published their findings earlier this month in the journal, Nature Communications Psychology.
In order to investigate the factors that influenced a person’s decision-making, the researchers devised a simple online learning game where participants were faced with making choices that led to either reward or punishment.
What they found was the participants generally fell into three distinct behavioural types that dictated whether they emerged winners or losers. The categories comprised what they called the “sensitives”, the “unawares” and the “compulsives”.
According to the paper, the “sensitives” were those who worked out which choices led to bad outcomes and changed their behaviour to avoid them.
The “unawares” were people who didn’t work things out, but were able to modify their strategies once they were shown the error of their ways.
The third, and most interesting group, were the “compulsives”. These were the folks who continued to make the wrong choices even after being shown where their strategy was letting them down.
The issue for people in this category wasn’t a lack of motivation or capacity, but rather a subtle but persistent failure to connect their actions with their consequences, the researchers said.
“We found that some people just don’t learn from experience,” study lead Dr Philip Jean-Richard-dit-Bressel said in a media release. “Even when they’re motivated to avoid harm and are paying attention, they fail to realise their own behaviour is causing the problem.”
He said this suggested a deeper issue, namely a failure to integrate new knowledge into a strategy that minimised adverse outcomes. Even when the compulsives understood the risks, they didn’t always adjust their actions accordingly.
Interestingly, the team also found these personality traits were consistent across cultural, age and demographical differences with about 26% classed as sensitives, 47% as unawares and 27% as compulsives.
Dr Jean-Richard-dit-Bressel said the patterns the researchers identified, where people ignored both experience and information, were similar to what we had been observed in studies of gambling and other compulsive behaviours.
This key takeout from the study could be significant for the developers of public health messaging because for more than a quarter of the folks out there, just providing information on the risks of harmful behaviours will not be enough to influence their actions.
Or to put it more simply, you can lead a horse to water but you’re going to have to try something else if you want to make it drink.
Sending sensitive story tips to holly@medicalrepublic.com.au is never a mistake.
