Personal Blogs

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)