You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

23 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish (US)
JournalPerspectives on Psychological Science
DOIs
StateAccepted/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

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