Texas A&M industrial/organizational psychologist Stephanie C. Payne, working with Stanley M. Gully from Rutgers University and colleagues from the University of Maryland and George Mason University, recently examined the effectiveness of two styles of training: error encouragement and error avoidance.
Error encouragement, she explains, allows individuals to explore and experiment and learn from their mistakes. This is in contrast to error avoidance training which discourages individuals from making mistakes.
The effectiveness of each of these training methods was examined on people with different levels of intelligence, openness to experience and conscientiousness. Payne and her colleagues found that the effectiveness of a particular training method depends greatly on the type of person receiving the training.
People with higher intelligence, she notes, perform better and show greater confidence in their ability to perform the behaviors learned in training when encouraged to make errors. The same holds true for people who exhibit high levels of openness to experience, she adds.
"Our results show that individual differences need to be further incorporated into training efforts because they may interact with the type of training employed," Payne says. "It is important to avoid a 'one size fits all' approach toward training."
However, Payne notes that error-encouragement training isn't for everyone. She says people who are not as intelligent benefit from a training style that emphasizes avoidance of errors. The performance and self-confidence of these low ability trainees are higher in an error-avoidance system, she adds.
Also, individuals who are highly conscientious may naturally attend to errors and encouraging them to further focus on errors actually reduces their confidence in their ability to perform the newly learned behaviors, Payne explains.
Participants in Payne and colleagues' research were asked to perform a computer simulation similar to actual U.S. Navy radar-tracking. Designed to emulate the workload and chaos of real-world decision- making situations, the simulation required participants to make four primary decisions about moving contacts on a screen as they approached the participants' "ship."
Based on information provided on the radar screen, participants had to correctly identify its type (land, sea or air), its class (military, civilian or unknown) and its intent (peaceful, hostile or unknown). Participants then had to make a final decision whether to clear, monitor, warn, lock-on or shoot the contact before it reached a specific zone on the screen.
Before the activity began, participants were randomly assigned to three groups in which they received instructions that were either consistent with error encouragement or error avoidance. A third, control group received instructions with no error emphasis.
Payne says this study has a much larger sample size than previous error training studies and is an important advancement because it suggests that error training may have positive or negative consequences for individuals with differing characteristics.
Contact: Stephanie Payne, (979)845-2090 or via email: scp@psyc.tamu.edu or Ryan A. Garcia, (979)845-4680 or via email: rag@univrel.tamu.edu
Journal
Journal of Applied Psychology