The Yerkes-Dodson Law - psychology

[Sly Saint]

I came across this on Psychology tools.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908) is a well-known finding in the psychology literature. In summary, the law suggests that performance increases with mental arousal (stress) but only up to a point. When an individuals’ level of stress is too low or too high, their performance deteriorates. This relationship between stress and performance is usually depicted as an inverted U-shaped curve.

Egan and colleagues (2014) recommend sharing the Yerkes-Dodson Law with perfectionistic individuals because of their dislike for inefficiency and wasted effort. The law also has important implications for overcoming perfectionistic striving:

• The law suggests that putting too much effort into tasks may be unnecessary (at best) and counterproductive (at worst).
• Perfectionistic striving and the stress associated with it increases the risk of inaccurate and inefficient performance (Ishida, 2005; Stoeber, 2011).
• People with perfectionism might achieve the same (or better) results if they approach activities in a less effortful and pressurized manner.
• Individuals benefit from finding their ‘zone of optimal performance’, which is likely to lie outside of the boundaries of perfectionistic striving.

The Performance And The Yerkes-Dodson Law handout provides an overview of the Yerkes-Dodson Law. It describes the ways in which excessive effort can be unnecessary and unhelpful when working towards goals. The handout also introduces the idea of experimenting with one’s ‘zone of optimal performance’ and approaching tasks more flexibly.

https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/performance-and-the-yerkes-dodson-law/

given that many examples of its use come up on a general google search, I'm assuming that it is taken as 'evidence based' fact in psychology.

But take a look at it's origins and subsequent 'development':

The Yerkes-Dodson Law and Performance
By Charlotte Nickerson, published Nov 15, 2021

https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html

 

[rvallee]

the law suggests that performance increases with mental arousal (stress) but only up to a point

As usual, you can substitute stress for exertion and it means the same. As you increase exertion, you get increased performance. Up to a point. Similarly you can increase the number of people who work on a problem and get better performance. Up to a point.

Have to bring out my economics hat but this is the law of diminishing returns and it's been known for a very long time. It applies in almost all industrial processes and, of course, labor.

There is no reason to separate physical exertion from mental exertion. Thinking is not free. Thinking of any kind requires energy, including emotions or simply paying attention/being alert. This is the same phenomenon at play. Cognitive exertion requires energy, consumes resources and produces byproducts that must be cleared up.

Absolutely nothing to do with perfectionism. This is junk.

 

[Peter T]

The abstract does not mention that expertise and practice affect the location of this curve on the x-axis and the shape of the curve. Also it is conceivable that circumstances can distort the curve by introducing floor or ceiling effects. Looking at humans in real life situations does not always mean we will see the classic inverted u curve.

 

[Sly Saint]

Later scholars generally agreed that the Yerkes-Dodson law was about the relationship between punishment and learning.

Corbett (2015) examines the lineage of this law in business writing and questions its application, calling it a “folk method.”

In particular, Corbett criticizes how the law has been extrapolated from its initially limited animal experiments to almost every facet of human task performance, with studies examining tasks as unrelated as product development teamwork, the piloting aircraft, competing in sports, and solving complex cognitive puzzles.

This has proved, Corbett argues, to create a situation where the law has become so ambiguous as to be unfalsifiable (2015). Corbett argues that the generally uncritical portrayal of the Yerkes-Dodson law in textbooks has added a veneer of scientific legitimacy to the management practice of increasing work stress levels at a time when more robust research is increasingly showing that increasing levels of work-related stress corresponds to decreasing mental and physical health.

Corbett, taking an argument from Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1996) posits that management theory is generally incapable of self-criticism, has confusing terminology, rarely “rises above common sense,” and is riddled with contradictions (2015).

Critical Evaluation
Yerkes and Dodsons’ original experimental design, scholars generally agree, was deeply flawed by modern standards - so much so that W. P. Brown wrote that the law should be “buried in silence” (Teigen, 1994; W. P. Brown, 1965).

Yerkes and Dodsons’ performance vs. stimulus curves were based on averages from just 2-4 subjects per conditions, the researchers performed no statistical tests (Gigerenzer and Murray, 2015), and the highest level of shock used in 3, 4, and 5 shock conditions were of different strengths.

The authors assumed that the linear response curve in the second set of experiments (with the easily-discriminated white and black boxes) was simply the first part of a U-curve which would have been fully uncovered given that they had subjected the mice to higher levels of shocks (Teigen, 1994).

Indeed, this experimental design has been misreported upon by later scholars, such as Winton (1987), who described the original study as a 3 x 3 design with three different levels of discrimination difficulty and three levels of shock strength.

Additionally, the Yerkes and Dodson, as Teigen (1994) points out, failed to discuss the concepts involved in the speed of habit-formation. Several of the original replicating studies, such as Dodson’s kitten experiment (1915), also showed poor experimental design.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html

 

[rvallee]

Oh, cringe. They tried to do the medical equivalent of the Laffer curve, which is not a real thing either.

The law of diminishing returns is generic, it's an observation law. It cannot prescribe the points where the curve rises or falls, as it varies with context and a whole bunch of other factors. It's the same simple idea that goes beyond the notion that 9 women cannot have a baby in a month.

There is an ideology in economics that is basically the same thing as what's wrong with medicine: supply-side economics, the idea that giving money to rich people trickles down to society. Pretty much everything wrong with medicine boils down to the same thing: ignore demand, prop up supply.

The Laffer curve is the idea that there is such a precise curve that maximizes tax revenue by finding the sweet spot of tax % where rich people invest but consumer spending remains strong, since giving money to rich people is always at the expense of taxing the poor and you can't tax them too much.

It's widely known to be nonsense. There is no such thing, as millions of actors dynamically react to the context and change the assumptions or find ways around them. No plan survives contact with reality, especially not with millions of people independently making decisions out of self-interest. And it looks like this is what they tried to do here. Intelligence is about adaptation, not finding rigid universal rules or formulas everyone should adhere to.

 

[bobbler]

I came across this on Psychology tools.



https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/performance-and-the-yerkes-dodson-law/

given that many examples of its use come up on a general google search, I'm assuming that it is taken as 'evidence based' fact in psychology.

But take a look at it's origins and subsequent 'development':

https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959354394044004

The paper traces the vicissitudes of the Yerkes-Dodson law from 1908 to the present. In its original form, the law was intended to describe the relation between stimulus strength and habit-formation for tasks varying in discrimination difficultness. But later generations of investigations and textbook authors have rendered it variously as the effects of punishment, reward, motivation, drive, arousal, anxiety, tension or stress upon learning, performance, problem-solving, coping or memory; while the task variable has been commonly referred to as difficulty, complexity or novelty, when it is not omitted altogether. These changes are seldom explicitly discussed, and are often misattributed to Yerkes and Dodson themselves. The various reformulations are seen as reflecting conceptual changes and current developments in the areas of learning, motivation and emotion, and it is argued that the plasticity of the law also reflects the vagueness of basic psychological concepts in these areas.

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMP-03-2013-0085/full/html

Findings – Analysis reveals that the YDL has no basis in empirical fact but continues to inform managerial practices which seek to increase or maintain, rather than minimise, levels of stress in the workplace as a means to enhance employee performance. Practical implications – Practitioners should not seek to increase performance through the manipulation of employee stress levels. Originality/value – The paper brings attention to the potentially harmful ways the publication of long-discredited models of stress and performance can influence management practice.

And this one (from someone for NASA): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060017835/downloads/20060017835.pdf

Is a long doc, but worth a read as it covers in pretty good plain speak a lot of the key topics that bundle under all of this - many of which are highly applicable to here. e.g. 'what is stress' (and the fact it is ill-defined)

The Infamous Inverted U The Yerkes and Dodson experiments later became the foundation on which the curvilinear relationship between arousal and performance was based. The belief in this relationship became so popular and widespread that it has taken its critics the better part of the last three decades to fully challenge it. There have been numerous criticisms of Yerkes and Dodson’s experiments, not the least of which concerns the mice-to-man extension of their findings as well as the generalizability of their simple laboratory learning paradigm to real-world complex performance issues. A further criticism concerns Yerkes and Dodson’s failure to measure stress (or even arousal) in these mice. Instead, they administered different levels of shock (which, incidentally, have also been criticized for their poor calibrations) that were later interpreted as resulting in arousal or stress in the mice. Certainly, one could argue that electric shock would in many instances increase arousal (surprisingly this is not always the case) and might even constitute stress, but Yerkes and Dodson did not themselves make this claim. However, a large portion of the psychological community concluded that electric shock increased the arousal in the mice, acting as a stressor of different intensities, motivating the mice to learn faster-a contentious and hotly debated issue to this day. The reality is that we don’t actually 3 know how aroused, stressed, motivated, anxious, or upset the mice were. This was never measured physiologically or behaviorally. It is interesting to note that subsequent research has found that mild to moderate electric shocks do not necessarily cause arousal in different animals and can be rapidly habituated to in laboratory settings (Hancock & Ganey, 2002; Hancock, Ganey, & Szalma, 2002).

 

[Woolie]

I came across this on Psychology tools.



https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/performance-and-the-yerkes-dodson-law/

given that many examples of its use come up on a general google search, I'm assuming that it is taken as 'evidence based' fact in psychology.

But take a look at it's origins and subsequent 'development':

https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html

This is just a bad piece. The Yerkes-Dodson Law does not have anything to say about perfectionism or effort at all. Its about the role of punishment in conditioned learning. Yerkes and Dodson found that mice learned to discriminate a punished from a non-punished behaviour better when the intensity of the punishment was moderate (moderate electric shock), compared to when it was high or very low.

The relationship they found suggests that there might be an "optimal" level of arousal/motivation that facilitates learning (specifically, operant conditioning), and levels above or below that optimum are less effective for learning.

Yerkes and Dodson lived a long time ago (1908), so maybe we have to forgive them for torturing mice in what seems like a senseless way. But it still makes me wince.