September 26, 2006
Loewenstein Discusses Value
of Learning from Examples
By Chantelle Wallace

Understanding the underlying principles in the examples you encounter is key to successful learning, said Jeffrey Loewenstein, assistant professor of management at McCombs, in his Faculty Research Speaker Series presentation Tuesday.

Video: Watch a clip from Prof. Loewenstein's talk.

“If you know how to better learn, you have a better shot at organizational advancement, learning how your organization works, performing better in it, communicating knowledge to others and integrating the information with what you already know,” Loewenstein said.

Describing examples as “the kind of thing you are getting all the time in your classes and from the newspapers,” Loewenstein said the challenge is discovering the lessons to be gleaned from examples. His research focuses on learning more successfully from examples to improve performance in the classroom and later in business.

Loewenstein demonstrated the improved comprehension that comes from examples involving contrast. He showed a picture of a locomotive, which held no meaning by itself. He then showed that locomotive next to a photo of a much bigger train to demonstrate the size increase that took place over a 30-year period. Lessons gleaned from such an example include inferring that because trains could carry more the cost of transportation decreased and the number of people traveling increased. The comparison used in the example gave the lesson context.

“If you are analyzing a single example, you run the risk of focusing on the particular details in that example, which doesn’t allow you to generalize,” he said.

To make each example more useful, it’s best to ask yourself the counterfactual question “what if” which can help you “tease out” the underlying structure in the example. As an illustration he mentioned the common political question, “What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?” A limitation of this approach, however, is what he called “garbage in, garbage out — if you don’t understand what’s going on in the example, it doesn’t matter how many counterfactuals you generate, you’re still not going to understand the example.”

Loewenstein showed how advertisers use comparisons to their advantage. MasterCard’s long-running and popular “Priceless Campaign” is an excellent example of juxtaposing common spending sources with an experience money can’t buy. This makes the advertisement memorable as it helps distract focus from “the surface stuff,” he said.

“Knowing this is useful because it helps people to get your ideas,” said Lowenstein, adding that students should ask their professors to provide additional examples in class to further the knowledge-retention process. 

His research is also useful in negotiations because “how you understand a decision influences which choices you make.”

“The best tool I have to help you understand the underlying principle of an example is to compare,” Loewenstein said. “It doesn’t matter who you are, you can learn if you compare.”