The Super Mario Effect: A Simple Trick to Avoid Getting Lost in Failure

A few years ago, former NASA and Apple engineer Marc Robert (now a popular YouTube blogger and TED speaker) ran a curious experiment.

He askedThe Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More | Mark Rober | TEDxPenn / @ TEDx Talks / YouTube YouTube subscribers to play a simple computer game created by Mark himself with a friend. Users had to guide the drawn car through a simple maze, programming its movement using a sequence of command blocks. They are visible on the right side of the screen.

By the same block principle, young children are taught to code. When the player composes the desired sequence of commands, he presses the Run button ("Let's go!"). The car starts to move, strictly following the given commands: "Move forward", "If the square is blue, turn right", "If the square is green, turn left."

As Robert himself explained to subscribers, he conducts an experiment to prove: to program

anyone can, regardless of age or education. About 50 thousand people played the game-code proposed by Mark.

Only later did it become clear: Robert's goal was completely different. The engineer was not trying to prove that everyone can program. He investigated the behavior of people depending on the "penalties" built into the program.

It turns out that Robert made two versions of the game. In the first of them, when a participant pressed Run and discovered that the code he had compiled did not lead the machine to the target, a message appeared on the screen: “It didn’t work. Please try again". At the same time, none of the 200 points given to the player at the start was lost. In the second version, the error message was different: “Didn't work. You have lost 5 points. You now have 195. Please try again. "

It seems that the difference was not very significant. But she helped reveal something important about the human psyche.

How loss affects people

The success of the two groups was obviously different. Among people who were not deducted from points for a mistake, 68% eventually coped with the game problem. But among those who were fined for each loss, only 52% achieved success. The difference is 16%!

In addition, Mark noticed how many attempts the members of each of the two groups made before giving up. Those who did not lose points, on average, approached the problem 12 times. Those who lost - only five.

These two observations can be summarized as follows.

People who made more attempts to solve the problem achieved success more often than those who gave up almost at the start. The same is true for real-world success.

Robert points out that the main difference between the two categories of players is this. People from the “successful” and “unsuccessful” groups received fundamentally different messages in case of failure. And, as a result, they reacted differently to it.

Through his experiment, Mark formulated the so-called Super-Mario Effect - a simple psychological trick that makes it easier to deal with defeat and achieve more. But before describing the essence of the phenomenon, it is worth discussing how we generally perceive failure and how it affects our behavior.

How people perceive failure

We want to be rich - therefore, we do not want to be poor. We are hungry for success - therefore, we do not want failure. If poverty is the opposite of wealth, then losing must be the opposite of winning. This is the generally accepted model of attitudes towards failure. Check it to come back to this later.

It is safe to assume that people perceive failure in a negative light. The fear of failure is so strongTheo Tsaousides Ph. D. Why Fear of Failure Can Keep You Stuck / Psychology Today, which can make us give up even trying to do something. Failure forces us to quit the game earlier than we should. They can even destroy self-esteem.

Although it’s not a matter of failures as such, but of our attitude towards them.

Returning to the play experiment of Mark Robert, you can see the following. Participants in both groups suffered defeats. But these losses were given different meanings. The first group was simply offered another try. Participants from the second were annoyingly informed: “Because of your mistake, you have already lost something! But okay, try again. "

Even though the participants in the second group did not lose anything real, but useless fake Internet glasses, they still gave up earlier than the players in the first one.

In the real world, we treat failure the same way. We consider them bad, painful. We think of them as something shameful that shouldn't have happened. About something that would be worth hiding from relatives and friends. And against this background, the world around us tells us to remain optimistic and try again... It's easier for us to surrender.

However, there is a better way to get a glimpse of the misses - turn on the Super Mario effect.

What is Super Mario Effect and how to apply it

As a child, Marc Robert was literally obsessed with the computer game of the same name. He spent hours controlling Mario, trying to get into the castle with his help and rescue the beautiful Princess Peach.

This is the idea behind the gamification of life, or the Super-Mario Effect.

It can be difficult to play and progress from level to level. Sometimes it's a long journey. When for some reason you get stuck at the next stage, it is annoying. But never such temporary defeats hit your self-esteem and are not painful.

Mark emphasizes: this is not a story about optimism. You are not trying to find something good in failure, you are just playing and overcoming obstacle after obstacle. Yes, falling sometimes. So what, and who does not fall in computer games?

The Super-Mario Effect suggests that real-life failure should be treated the same way. They are not negative events, but an inevitable, albeit annoying, part of your journey.

And let's return to the thesis voiced above that failure is the opposite of success, just as poverty is wealth. This statement is actually wrong. Being poor for a long time will not make you rich. And a long period of failure - if you learn from mistakes and memorize the location of the pits - ultimately leads you to victory.

Thus, failure is not the opposite of success. She is his predecessor.

J.K. Rowling failed 12 times before, on the thirteenth, her famous story about a boy with a scar on his forehead was finally accepted for publication. Edison had to go through a thousand failures to invent the light bulb on the 1001st approach. You are just like them. Likewise, you will fail N times before you succeed at anything. Two losses in a row means you are two steps closer to winning than you were before.

Defeats are inevitable on the way to the goal: life is arranged that way. Your task is to jump over the "pits". It's like you are a computer hero who just goes through the next level.