The Super Mario EffectWhy is it worth treating life like a computer game? Let's figure it out. Where did the Super Mario effect come from? Not long ago, Mark Robert - a modern famous YouTube blogger and TED speaker, a former NASA and Apple engineer - conducted an interesting study. He invited his followers to play a simple game that he created with a friend. Its essence was that it was necessary to guide a programmed machine through a simple labyrinth. Users had to create a sequence of commands, press the “Let's go!” button. and then the virtual vehicle began to move according to the given commands. Robert explained to his subscribers that the purpose of his experiment was to prove that anyone can program, regardless of age, gender and profession. As a result, almost 50,000 Internet users played the game. However, it later became known that his goal was different. The former engineer wanted to analyze people's reactions, taking into account the "fines" that were built into the game. However, the blogger developed two different versions of the game program. In the first, if the participant created the wrong code and did not complete the maze, a message was displayed on the screen: “Failed. Try again,” but he kept his points. In the second, everything was different, including the text with an error: “It didn’t work out. You have lost five points. Try again.” At first glance, it seems that the difference is small. However, this experiment allowed us to learn something about the human psyche. How losses affect people The results of the players from the two groups were different. Of the representatives of the first, 68% of the participants achieved the task, and the second - only 52%, which turns out to be 16% less. Robert also analyzed how many attempts users had before they gave up. It turned out that followers who did not lose points were more likely to complete the task and still guide the car through the maze. The former engineer came to the conclusion that those subjects who made more attempts to complete the goal were more likely to succeed, according to compared to those who gave up at the very beginning. According to the author of the study, the difference between the two groups is that the participants received different notifications about the error. And, naturally, they treated her differently. As a result of this experiment, Robert developed a psychological trick, which he gave the name Super-Mario effect. The essence is the ability to easily respond to defeats and achieve great results. Before going into more detail about this effect, I will tell you how we react to failure and how it affects our behavior. How People React to Failure If we consider the desire to be rich, we can summarize that wanting to be rich means not wanting to be poor. If a person wants to succeed, then it turns out that he does not want failure. It turns out that poverty is the antonym of wealth, and loss is the antonym of victory. This is exactly what many people think. It turns out that people react negatively to failures. Moreover, the fear of luck is so strong that it can even force a person to give up his intended goal and even undermine his self-esteem. But the point is not in the failures, but in the attitude towards them. If we return to Robert’s game, we can see that the participants of all groups had defeats, but they reacted to them differently. In the real world, we call failures something bad, we consider them shameful, we think they are something that should not have happened. Or we think of them as something that needed to be hidden from loved ones. And when our environment tells us to stay positive and try again, it’s easier for us to give up than to take risks. But the Super Mario effect will help us react to our failures differently. What is the Super Mario effect Little Robert was a fan of the computer game about Mario. He spent hours controlling the main character to complete all the levels. The blogger is convinced that when a person starts playing and fails at the first level, he begins to believe that he has nothing.