Positive and Negative Transfer Effects
In Psychology, there
is something known as the ‘negative transfer effect’.
Rudimentally, this means that given a problem to solve, there is a
set of rules that someone has learnt, or internally adheres to in
their general life, that may inhibit a successful solution being
found, because those rules are so fixed in the individual that
lateral thinking, or thinking outside the box, does not occur to
them. To even think, ‘Ah ha! I need to think laterally here!’
would actually negate this ‘negative transfer effect’; but only
if knowing that thinking outside the box might give an appropriate
solution is a norm for an individual. Get it? Anyone who normally
thinks outside the box is not already hindered. However, if wild and
lateral thinking is the norm for an individual, following a linear
series of steps to solve a problem can be difficult. Some people with
a good understanding of mathematics struggle to pass a ‘Functional
Maths’ Level Two exam. In case you don’t know what that is; it is
approximately the level of a nine year old primary school child in
the UK.
Someone I know has a
nickname, slightly contemptuous, I suppose, for a work colleague,
‘word count’. I am told that ‘word count’ will use five words
when one will do. I think that there may be an inherent mental health
issue at play here. I think this chap is probably talking around a
subject and landing on each facet of the topic, which to him, needs
mentioning; quite simply because they are fascinating to him, or
maybe they are just awkward stumbling blocks which need to be
dismantled by spoken dissemination.
Someone with Macular
Degeneration, a vision problem that affects how the central part of
an image is perceived, sees only the periphery around a blind or
blurred central spot. There may be blurred or no vision in the centre
of their visual field. To have some understanding of what this may be
like we might, ourselves, try to see in very low light conditions. We
have cells in our eyes; rods and cones. The cones ‘see’ colour
and are important to us during strong light conditions. The rods in
the human eye are most sensitive to light but generally, are located
in a ring around the cones; so a doughnut (Am. ‘donut’) shape.
This means that often the best impression of something we want to see
in low light conditions is gained by looking slightly to one side or
above or below the object. In other words, you can’t look ‘at’
it. Human night-vision is also in black and white and devoid of
colour.
The Secretarybird,
found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, is a predator, resembling an
eagle on very long, stork-like legs; reaching up to 1.3 metres tall.
It likes to eat snakes and small animals and hunts on the ground. It
uses its sharp vision to find its prey by walking about a location
and jerking its head about in different directions, seeking movement.
It turns its head and focuses; turns its head and focuses, and then
moves to a new spot; even returning to a rock or bush it had only
just been to.
Now. Let us
intermesh our limited understanding of how the person suffering with
macular degeneration sees; what we see in the dark; and how the
Secretarybird stares, focuses, and analyses each rock or bush; then
moves on to the next. Let us also consider how my friend’s
colleague ‘word-count’ communicates. Are they not the same? Each
one of the entities used as examples for how vision is used have no
choice in the application of their specific visual acuity, and
word-count, much like a Secretarybird has great focus, but is
compelled to examine each ‘rock’ before the whole landscape is
understood or described. Perhaps, for ‘Word-count, the central
image or focus is not available to him, and the shape of the concept
is explained instead. It is also possible that that he is secretly in
love with my acquantance and babbles, or he is teaching himself as he
speaks, by assembling a construct of ideas.
Word-count’s
passion and confusion aside, we might say that these entities have
hard-wired systems. These hard-wired systems are far-removed from
thought processes that result from experience because experience is
mutable; it grows with each new experience; at least it should. The
only resemblance is; experience could, disastrously, result in an
heuristic, or rule of thumb, that is taken by the individual to be a
hard-wired process of problem-solving. It is the past experience of
an individual that generally determines how that individual
approaches problem-solving. ‘Good at problem-solving’ on your CV
doesn’t really mean anything, does it? It just means that you
solved problems once upon a time, yet you may well have a fixed
mind-set.
We can see how the
negative transfer effect is demonstrated if, at a high street
jewellers, the door from the high street opens differently to how
high street shop doors normally open. There are videos on YouTube
that show thieves giving up trying to escape a jewellers because they
are trying to force the doors outwards, when they should have just
gently pulled the unlocked doors inwards. Certainly, in England, we
normally push the door to enter the shop and pull the door to leave
the shop. When doors operate like this, a thief needs to spend more
time to leave the shop with swag, because a full pelt run comes to a
full stop in order to be able to pull on the door’s handle. That,
however, is not the reason why our doors open like this; it is so
pedestrians, passing the shop, don’t get hit in the face with an
opening door.
Now we understand
how a movement from one position, circumstance, or situation may
smoothly transgress into, what may seem to the character in a story
to be serendipitous, and a reader may just follow that rule of one
state of being smoothly passing into another – the door opens
inwards so the passage from outside to inside is barely slowed, or
the transition from stranger to acqauintance is merely a few shared
words of commonality. Withdrawing from an environment (or shop) or a
situation, however, usually requires a pause if a threshold is
actually crossed and the ‘door’ closed, before escape is fully
achieved. An individual may create a pause in the movement of another
character merely by saying, ‘One moment’, or ‘ Wait!’, or
‘I…’, or any other utterance, and then may say, ‘Never
mind’, or shake their head once, left and right, as they, mirroring
the movement, gently swat the air with a flat hand. This is akin to
the pause before the door opens to leave the shop, environment, or
circumstance. This would create a level of tension between people or
characters in a story, especially if no other words, notably, went
between them beforehand.
So far, we have
looked at the positive transfer effect; in that all the action and
interaction follows a standard format and one circumstance naturally
flows into another. A child, without having fully formed a honed set
of heuristics to use as a template to test the world, will not be at
all surprised if one of the characters in a book, or an individual in
their scope of perception, suddenly acts weirdly. One of the
characters or individuals would only need to glance over their
shoulder as they leave the presence of another, and an adult reader
or viewer may infer that something is afoot; a child, however, may
only understand that a character looked at another character or
person. Fundamentally, there is no pause if two characters are in a
open space and it is only distance that shall, or does, determine
separation between these characters. So, a wide-open space with no
hindrances that cause a delay in movement has only potential for a
fading relationship between people. By fading, I mean there is an
absence of finality. Typically, in films the viewer sees this as one
person in a nascent romantic relationship running after the other as
they tearfully leave town, never to return again. ‘Well, go get
him!’ Of course, their relationship may instead continue to cook on
the proverbial back-burner. One of these participants may even thwart
a mutually attractive and symbiotic future relationship by fantasing
a future and inadvertently using this fantasy as a false memory that
is then egregiously considered, by them, to be a real experience.
Just consider jealousy, for example. A pause, as the threshold of
possible social interaction and improbable social interaction is
actually crossed, creates a world of possibilities in a relationship
between people, but there must be a clearly defined threshold.
A simplified scene
of two people without embellishment or style:
‘Goodbye’.
‘Goodbye’.
Martin turned and
began to walk away.
‘I…I..No’.
The distance between
them grew.
Now the same scene
without the pause.
‘Goodbye’.
‘Goodbye’.
Martin turned and
began to walk away. The distance between them grew.
Positive and
negative transfer is within the field of associative learning. For
most of us, one set of problems were solved in a particular way, and
that ‘way’ becomes for us our ‘way’ of doing things. My wife
would call this her ‘inimicable style’. In an exclusively visual
world, she would have been wearing an ‘L’ plate (from the ‘L’
that learner drivers place on their vehicles to designate their
status as being inexperienced). But, in explaining experience, I am
not seeking to portray a character’s style or personality in a
story; I want to understand people’s fallibility; their inability
to easily open the proverbial door; the fumble; the hesitation; not
the covert look, but instead the unguarded and accidental look. Real
people do not flow from one environment to another without a slip.
There is an incongruity about them. From the two scenes above; we
know that the Martin in the first scene is human because we have
learnt that only humans talk and there is the expectation that it is
Martin who turns and speaks; because that is our experience of how
books are written; unless it is otherwise clearly stated, the last
person mentioned is the owner of the next piece of speech. In the
same scene above but without speech, the ‘distance’ could be
attributed to the enlarging geographical space between Martin and the
other character, or it could be an opening intangible chasm that
serves to separate their future relationship. Yet, there may be a
third character AND Martin might instead be a dog or other walking
entity. Of course, it is implied that there are only two humans and
no other entities; but that is only implication which works on our
shared understanding of normal practice.
Here then, in the
example above, is an example of the positive transfer effect being
upset by a new perspective, which jolts our perception into an
unconscious recognition of our fallibility to correctly understand a
scenario. In effect, the possibility of not understanding the scope
of the scene is an example of negative transfer – believing things
happen this way and only this way, and we are later shown to be wrong
or are given conflicting information.
Unfortunately, most
of us don’t realise that our experience binds and circumscribes our
understanding of a situation. Our perception is working fine, but it
is compromised by our experience, and, in many cases, not by our
complete lack of experience. Strangely, zero experience often trumps
some experience; and a great deal of experience from different
perspectives indubitably trumps only some experience. We might know
this as: ‘ A little bit of knowledge is worse than none at all’.
A little bit of knowledge, or experience, prevents us from
approaching an operation with fresh eyes, and so a toolbox of
unfettered, and uncluttered, set of possibilities is not available to
us. Let us not forget, though, that all of us need to be shown how to
do things; we cannot expect wolves to raise our children in the
forest, and then expect the children to be able to use cutlery to
feed themselves in a restaurant.
Positive and
Negative Framing
This
cognitive bias can
be expressed in terms of
stating information with a positive or negative slant; the
result, nonetheless, being the same for either choosing
one solution to a problem over another.
Simply, and loosely:
‘This medicine saves
80% of the sufferers of a
disease’, is positive framing. ‘This medicine cannot save 20% of
the sufferers of a disease’, is negative framing. This,
though, is a very simplistic approach is showing how describing
something differently creates different expectations in the minds of
recipients of information.
Let us delve into
this a little more. In buying a second-hand motorcycle, a group of
friends went separately to try to buy the motorcycle as cheaply as
they could. The person in the group who was to be the owner of the
motorbike went first to try it out. The advertised price was £200.
The seller, was the father of the owner of the motorcycle. The father
was not a fan of motorbikes. An offer of £170 was made with a
determination that a good price to pay would be £180. The offer was
refused. Next, a series of friends went and made lower offers; £120;
£140; and £130; each of which were refused. Finally, the last
friend went to view the motorbike and offered £170 again, with the
authority to pay £180. The offer of £170 was accepted. Each of the
lower offers served to positively frame the original offer. The same
amount was accepted from the last friend because the seller’s
expectaction was that only low offers would follow. This is
positively framing.
It is possible;
indeed, I heard this is true, that Vladamir Putin, at election times,
similarly set up opposing political parties that faded into obscurity
or had obvious failings, to positively frame his own political
position.
In business, an
unscrupulous entrepreneur may set up, perhaps, five businesses in the
same industry; all of them viable. However, only one of these
businesses is the true focus of the entrepreneur’s attention. If
these five businesses take up five of the first page of Google
listing and four of the websites offer a poor service; five
competitors cannot occupy those slots on the first page and one of
the websites out of the five will be more favourable than the other
four ‘practically psuedo’ businesses. This could, by extension,
be an example, if conducted well, of both negatively framing
competitors’ businesses, while at the same time positively framing
one of the five businesses operated by the unscrupulous entrepreneur.
One might not be surprised to discover that Unilever owns around
about two-thirds of the businesses that make the butter-like spreads
in a UK supermarket fridge. The unscrupulous businessman with five
businesses with five separate web pages on the first page of a Google
listing is not at all dissimilar. The difference is, though, that the
dastardly cad is attempting to use some of the webpages to negatively
frame its competitors. You may well find, without too much scrutiny,
evidence of such behaviour in modern marketing; it is, however, only
a very recent slide into devilishly unfair tactics.
In marketing, there
is something known as, ‘Collusive Bidding’. It is banned in the
UK. Essentially, there would be a cartel of businesses who take it in
turns to bid for a contract, much in the way of a ‘Dutch Auction’.
One of the businesses in the cartel puts in a lower bid, still high
but lower. Mostly, they get the contract. When a business in a cartel
has a slack period of activity, that is the one which ‘gets’ the
contract. Because, there are extremely heavy penalties for this type
of activity, there is a strong compulsion for a competitor to report
this nefarious activity.
A wily person can
negatively frame other job interviewees by speaking in the negative,
such as; ‘I don’t go home until the task is done’. This
suggests that other people will leave work unfinished for their own
selfish ends. This tactic used to work – except now, job
interviewers want to establish that the potential employee will have
a good work/life balance (It is good for the hiring business, due to
it avoiding employee mental ill-health caused by too much work). Now,
I suppose, one needs to exhibit robustness in job interviews.
Ultimately, the interviewee, by default, frames their own application
positively.
Bibliography
National Geographic,
Secretarybirds,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/secretary-bird
Accessed 03 February
2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)
mental health 