In April 1998 I attended a seminar by Rick Moneymaker, of the DSI. He taught various principles or "players to the game" that he argued would improve ability to apply techniques. Having been shown the players, many people at the seminar tried the players and agreed, perhaps to their suprise, that the players were effective. I would like to argue that various of these principles taught by DSI for improving the effectiveness of a technique may not in reality do so, despite the genuinely favourable experiences of people taught the principles in a seminar setting.
I have looked at the following principles in more detail, as they apply to the centre lock (nikyo):
1. Imagining
a colour flowing from yourself into the uke;
2. Vibrating your arm.
At the seminar, Rick Moneymaker suggested that if we tried either of these principles we would find that to get the same effect on our uke we would only need to apply half the effort. Indeed, many people were surprised at just how true this was.
The explanations given to us were in terms of traditional Chinese medicine. When flowing a colour we were asked to use yellow. Each element is associated with a colour, and yellow happened to be right for the move we were using. Maybe for vibration we were producing the resonant frequency of the organ whose meridian we were attacking. But the exact explanation doesn't matter for my purposes; just that there was an explanation offered that people believed and the move worked.
There is a simple explanation of people's experiences that needs to be ruled out before more exotic explanations can even be considered. Experimental psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the power of belief and expectation in moulding people's experiences. The simple explanation is this: People experienced the move as being easier simply because that was what was suggested to them.
This is easy to test, so that's what I did one session at my club. The idea of the test is that if people are simply being responsive to suggestion, then suggesting opposite things to different groups of people should result in them having opposite experiences. Telling people that vibration will make the move easier should result in vibration indeed making the move easier. But, crucially, telling people that vibration will make the move harder should result in vibration making the move harder. If there is no effect of suggestion and vibration works because of resonant frequencies etc, then vibration will make the move easier regardless of people's expectations. The same logic applies for colours.
I divided the class into two groups of nine. Another instructor took one group through some kicks, I worked on 'principles for making an effective S-shaped lock' with my group. After some practice getting the mechanics of the move right, I gave them instruction set A below (verbally), which suggested to them that vibration would make application of the centre lock more difficult. I let them play around with vibration and non-vibration. I asked each person to give me a number reflecting how much more effort did they need to put into the technique with vibration compared to the technique without vibration in order to get the same effect on the uke - if twice as much effort they should say '2', if the same '1', and if half as much then '1/2', etc. The I gave them instruction set B below, suggesting to them that flowing blue will increase the effectiveness of the move, but flowing red would decrease the effectiveness of the move. After they played with red and blue, I got ratings on how much more effort did they needed to put in with red in order to get the same effect on the uke as blue.
Then I swapped groups with the other instructor, and repeated the procedure, but this time using instruction sets C and D, suggesting that vibration would increase the effectiveness of the technique, and that red rather than blue would increase the effectiveness of the technique.
Note that any resemblance between explanations in the instructions and reality is purely coincidental - my purpose was to give a convincing story, not a true one!
Here are the mean ratings, where the higher the number means more in accordance with suggested expectations. I have put in brackets the 'standard deviations' of the numbers - this is a measure of the spread of the numbers about the mean. Then I have used a Wilcoxon test to test if the numbers are different from 1 (1 meaning no effect of applying the principle). The value labelled 'p' is the statistical 'significance' of the result - all you need to know is, if this number is less than .05, you can conclude that were effected by the manipulation.
Suggestion:
| Vibration decreases effectiveness |
1.9 |
(SD=0.2) | p=.009 |
| Vibration increases effectiveness | 1.5 | (SD = 0.5) | p=.04 |
| Blue increases effectiveness | 1.3 | (SD=0.2) | p=.04 |
| Blue decreases effectiveness | 1.7 | (SD=1.0) | p=.06 |
Notice that in all cases people's average reported experiences were in the direction of the suggestion. Those people told that vibration decreased the effectiveness of the move found they had to apply twice the effort with vibration as without vibration in order to get the same pain on the uke. Those told that vibration increased the effectiveness of the move, needed to apply 50 percent more effort without vibration in order to get the same effect as with vibration. In both cases I heard people say 'wow, it really makes a difference'! For colours it can be seen the results show exactly the same pattern, if somewhat weaker in magnitude. People were amazed at how 'effective' the principle was that I had taught them.
Maybe the effects would have been bigger if I had suggested bigger effects (I explicitly suggested a factor of 2 difference). Maybe they would have been bigger if I truly believed what I was saying - no doubt my lack of belief subtly influenced my delivery. Even so the reported effects are LARGE - on average, the different manipulations increased the effectiveness of the move by 30 to 100 percent - that's a BIG improvement in the effectiveness of your technique! That's of the same order as was suggested to us in the seminar I went to. Only trouble is, your technique isn't really any better!
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