Here is an excerpt from an article written by Eben Harrell for Harvard Business Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
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Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago’s Booth School gave subjects an extremely hard test, asking them to choose one of two possible answers for each question. Half the subjects then received feedback on what they’d gotten right (success feedback) and the others on what they’d gotten wrong (failure feedback). Though all received full information on which answers were correct, in follow-up tests the people given success feedback were able to answer the same questions accurately, but those given failure feedback had learned much less—and often nothing. The conclusion: Maybe failure isn’t the best teacher.
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, defend your research.
Eskreis-Winkler: Our culture tells us that we learn from failure. Successful people reflecting on their journeys advise us to “fail forward.” In a recent commencement speech, [U.S. Supreme Court] Chief Justice John Roberts actually wished the students “bad luck”—so that they’d have something to learn from. Yet my coauthor, Ayelet Fishbach, and I find that failure often has the opposite effect. It undermines learning.
When people fail, they feel threatened and tune out. This surprised us. Many negative experiences are attention-grabbing. Next time you pass an accident on the highway, try not looking at it. Yet when it comes to personal failures, people look away to protect their egos, and as a result they don’t learn—unless they are highly motivated.
HBR: Why weren’t your study participants highly motivated?
People tend to ignore failure when it’s safe to do so. Not knowing the answers to questions like “How much money do U.S. companies lose to poor customer service each year?” and “Which of the following characters in an ancient script represents an animal?” isn’t a huge deal.
By contrast, when failures are so large that they cannot be safely ignored, people do tune in and learn. There’s a phenomenon in psychology called aversion learning. For example, lab rats who taste poison, receive shocks, or experience other painful “failures” learn from the experiences. There is a threshold above which we learn from failure, but many everyday failures don’t pass muster.
Where is that threshold?
The unsatisfying answer is that it depends. It’s somewhere between getting a multiple-choice question wrong and tasting poison. In a set of follow-up studies, we tested whether a large bonus incentive would help people learn from failure. We also tested whether making the content of the test more social in nature would improve outcomes, because people have a propensity to tune in to social information. For example, we asked questions such as “Which of the following two couples are engaged?” Yet neither change affected the results.
People look away to protect their egos, and as a result they don’t learn.
In another experiment we raised the stakes in a different way: We approached about 300 U.S. telemarketers and gave them a challenging test about customer service, a topic directly relevant to their jobs. But, again, our results were similar. The telemarketers who received success feedback on the questions they answered right demonstrated learning, while those who got failure feedback on the questions they answered wrong didn’t. Sure, performing poorly on a customer service test might have made those participants feel a little rotten, but the failure wasn’t so big that they felt compelled to attend to it. They preferred to protect their egos.
So we all struggle to learn from failure?
In our experiments people learned less from failure than from success, on average, but that was not true of every individual. There was notable variation among the subjects. Some participants paid attention to failure and learned a lot from it. Previous research by Ayelet shows that the effect may depend on expertise. Experts have been shown to respond better to failure than novices do. When people have many successes under their belts, one mess-up feels less threatening.
Alternatively, in our studies the resilient minority may have had what Carol Dweck at Stanford University calls a “growth mindset.” They may have believed in their own potential for improvement, which motivated them to stay in the game. Perhaps if we had taught everyone in our studies to adopt a growth mindset, we would have seen learning from failure across the board.
How can you teach people to have a growth mindset?
Simply by explaining that the brain can grow and that their abilities are not fixed but open to improvement.
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Eben Harrell is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review (HBR) whose international career has placed him in the upper echelons of journalism and business. Before joining HBR, Harrell worked as a foreign correspondent in the London bureau of TIME, as an associate at the Harvard Kennedy School and as a senior editor for L.E.K. Consulting, a global strategy consultancy.