Watch and learn
Video is ubiquitous as a learning tool. From picking up home DIY skills to learning an instrument, video is a go-to tool for enhancing our abilities. Yet recent studies reveal a potential backfiring effect. Watching video tutorials may cause us to overestimate how much we can actually do and to feel like we’re acquiring skills when we’re really not. As one researcher describes in his study, “the more people watch others perform, the more they think they can perform the skill too.”
So, what are the pitfalls we need to be wary of?
Psychological illusions
If you stick your hand into the metaphorical bag of psychological studies and pull one out, chances are you’ll hold one with the word “illusion” in the title. There’s the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, the End-of-history-illusion, the Focusing Illusion… The list goes on.
‘Illusion’ studies often reveal a systematic misperception people have. For example, Dan Gilbert’s paper on the End-of-history illusion shows that people underestimate how much they’ll change as they get older. Ask yourself what some of your favourite things are today: favourite band, favourite food, etc. Are they the same as they were 10 years ago? Do you think they will be the same 10 years from now? He found that although people’s personality and preferences indeed become more consistent over time, people under-predict the extent to which they’ll change. In reality we change more than we think we will. In Gilbert’s studies, this misperception occurs in people of all ages, from teenagers to grandparents. Here’s a great Ted Talk on it by the man himself.
There are many research papers like this that apply to various slices of life, from mispredicting the how long something will make you happy for, to helping explain why we envy others.
The illusion of skill acquisition
One particular illusion relevant to companies with learning goals comes from a paper called Easier seen than done: Merely watching others perform can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. As the eponymous title suggests, the paper demonstrates individuals’ overconfidence for performing a skill after watching it done on video.
Funnily enough, I actually ran the in-person studies for this paper when I worked at the University of Chicago. Here’s how one of the studies worked.
With study protocol in hand, I led participants to a private room where they sat at a computer. They were told that they would watch a training video of someone moonwalking. They would then get one chance to attempt the same move, and would be video-taped so a separate group of people could rate their attempt.
Critically, some of these participants watched the training video once, while other participants watched it twenty times in a row. Then everyone was asked to predict how an average person would rate their attempt at moonwalking.
When they were finished watching the video and answering questions, they turned towards me, holding a camera, explaining that they were now going to attempt to moonwalk while I recorded it. I think you can imagine some of the reactions.
How did they do?
Here’s why they call it an illusion. Participants who watched the instructional video twenty times were more likely to overestimate their moonwalking abilities compared to those who watched it once. The more they watched, the more confident they felt. As the authors put it, “Repeated observation inflated people’s perceived ability.”
Out of those who watched the video twenty times, 57% said their attempt was worse than expected. Only 32% of people from the group of people who watched it once said their performance was worse than they expected.
Researchers found this overestimation-effect occurred during other activities too: dart-throwing, juggling, playing a computer game. The more participants watched someone performing an action in the video, the more they overestimated their own abilities.
The author, Michael Kardas says "Our findings suggest that merely watching others could cause people to attempt skills that they might not be ready or able to perform themselves."
Kardas’ study went on to inspire Dr. Marryanne Garry at the University of Waikato where she found that video similarly led to people overestimate their ability to perform tasks they had no specialised training in, such as landing a plane!
You might be thinking “Okay, so I’ll watch the video once instead of 20 times and won’t overestimate my abilities.” But people still overestimated their abilities after watching the video once - just to a lesser extent. The effect vanished when participants were asked to read instructions on how to perform an action instead. Video itself is the culprit!
How to mitigate this effect
So,what is the key ingredient you’re looking for? The answer is practice, practice, practice. In one study, a group of people watched a video of someone juggling bowling pins and then were asked to rate their confidence in juggling the same pins. Then they were asked to hold the pins for just a minute, giving them a “taste” of juggling without actually doing the task. Then they rated their confidence again. Results showed that holding the pins for a minute lowered their confidence. Although they didn’t do the task, they got a “feeling” of the task in action.
When it comes to teaching a workforce new skills, Kardas’ study reinforces the idea that a hand off of information isn’t enough. Simply saying “Here’s how you use this managerial technique” or “Here’s how to have a hard conversation” risks not being enough. Colleagues need to be able to practice and fail in a safe space. This can be done in a variety of ways depending on time and budget, ranging from multiple choice questions, to using immersive story telling techniques, to high-spec video simulations.
Consider the practical application of this. Imagine watching a video of good management techniques, how to run a meeting, or have an important conversation about DEI and inclusivity, then overestimating your ability to do it in real life. A moment of practice puts so much into perspective.
