An Experimental Study of Learning Mechanism Invoking on 'Learning by Doing' and 'Observational Learning'

摘要

In management practice, the learning behaviors of employees,consumers,and entrepreneur innovation diffusion are the focus of attention of managers and researchers. How individuals learn and what factors affect learning process are very important. Merlo and Schotter's (2003) experiment for "learning by doing" and "observational learning" draws a conclusion that the effect of observational learning (learning not by doing but observation) may be better than learning by doing. However, there exist some opposite situations in reality. The paper studies the influencing factors of learning mechanism priming under different situations. The experiment results show that doing or not in form ("doing" or "observing") is not the deciding factor affecting learning process. Otherwise immediate feedback stimulus of reward or punishment leads to priming different learning mechanisms,and different nested combination of basic mechanisms affects the performance of learning.