Abstract
Society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. But do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard. We present a unifying framework that points to emotional and cognitive barriers that make learning from failure difficult. Emotions undermine learning because people find failure ego-threatening. People tend to look away from failure and not pay attention to it to protect their egos. Cognitively, people also struggle because the information in failure is less direct than the information in success and thus harder to extract. Beyond identifying barriers, this framework suggests inroads by which barriers might be addressed. Finally, we explore implications. We outline what, exactly, people miss out on when they overlook the information in failure. We find that the information in failure is often high-quality information that can be used to predict success.
Original language | English (US) |
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Journal | Perspectives on Psychological Science |
DOIs | |
State | Accepted/In press - 2022 |
Funding
We are grateful to Eda Erensoy for her help. L. Eskreis-Winkler extends special thanks to Ari Lustig, who makes everything better, even learning from failure.
Keywords
- barriers
- failure
- learning
- motivation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Psychology