Anatomy of a Breakthrough by Adam Alter EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Adam Alter
- Language: English
- Genre: Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
WHY GETTING STUCK IS INEVITABLE
Clark Hull spent his academic career studying rats in mazes, which was
poetic because his youth was littered with dead ends. By the age of
eighteen, Hull had been forced to join—and managed to escape—a
religious sect. He battled typhoid and polio, one after the other, and almost
lost the ability to walk and to see. “My eyes were so weak,” he
remembered, “that my mother began reading William James’ Principles of
Psychology to me.” Hull dabbled in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and
engineering, but nothing clicked until James’ classic book launched Hull’s
stellar career as a research psychologist.
Hull spent three decades as a professor at Yale, where he studied maze
running in rats. He and his colleagues would bet milkshakes on which rat
would run each maze fastest. Hull was incredibly productive. According to
his friend and colleague Carl Hovland, Hull was by far the most cited
psychologist in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “Hull’s scientific work
comprised [several] phases,” Hovland said, “each of which constituted what
other men would be proud to consider the work of an entire lifetime.”
Hull spent decades watching rats run mazes because, like many
psychologists at the time, he was interested in learning and behavior. The
mazes allowed him to measure how fast the animals were moving in a
controlled environment. Over and over he saw the same pattern: the rats
moved quickly when they neared the end of the maze, but moved slowly or
stopped altogether at its beginning and middle. The end of the maze was
like a magnet that pulled them more strongly as they got closer. This was
true regardless of whether the mazes were long, straight tunnels or complex
webs of trunks and branches. Hull called this pattern the goal gradient
effect. Though the maze was completely flat, the rats seemed to experience
it differently as they went along. They appeared to struggle as if running
uphill during its early sections, but sprinted as if running downhill when the
goal was in sight.
In the ninety years since Hull described the effect, psychologists have
shown that it applies to people, too. In one experiment from a paper
published in 2006, researchers tracked how quickly customers bought ten
cups of coffee on the way to a free eleventh cup. The interval between the
first and second cup was 20 percent longer than the interval between the
ninth and tenth cups, suggesting that coffee drinkers were significantly
more motivated as they approached that free eleventh cup. In another
experiment, people who visited a music-rating website were offered a $25
Amazon voucher for rating fifty-one songs on fifty different scales—a total
of 2,550 ratings. Raters were forty times more likely to quit early in the task
than closer to the goal, and they rated more songs each time they visited the
site.
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