Miss me with that trick
Based on a junior high school teacher who started every school year with the same speech. The blank slate probably sounded good in his head, but it always felt to me like we were being set up to fail. Like “you just wait: you’ll mess it up, somehow.”
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Maybe the teacher should’ve told them that they’ll have to work their buts off if they want to keep it……
Can’t believe I’m almost caught up after all these months of reading!
Anyway, you kind of were being set up to fail. My understanding is that this approach is best utilized for demoralization rather than motivation. I’m not a psychologist, but I think the setup is tapping into something they call loss-aversion. Geoff Engelstein (a professor teaching Game Theory at some eastern college), writes about it semi-frequently on his Game Tek blog. Most recently, he used this years Emmy’s to illustrate the idea: https://gametek.substack.com/p/game-design-lessons-from-the-emmy (pointing out that people hate losing something so much, that gaining an equal amount results in a good feeling which is smaller than the bad feeling associated with the loss).