Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Dec;30(12):1733-1744. doi: 10.1177/0956797619881133. Epub 2019 Nov 8.
Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. Yet in five studies (total = 1,674), failure did the opposite: It undermined learning. Across studies, participants answered binary-choice questions, following which they were told they answered correctly (success feedback) or incorrectly (failure feedback). Both types of feedback conveyed the correct answer, because there were only two answer choices. However, on a follow-up test, participants learned less from failure feedback than from success feedback. This effect was replicated across professional, linguistic, and social domains-even when learning from failure was less cognitively taxing than learning from success and even when learning was incentivized. Participants who received failure feedback also remembered fewer of their answer choices. Why does failure undermine learning? Failure is ego threatening, which causes people to tune out. Participants learned less from personal failure than from personal success, yet they learned just as much from other people's failure as from others' success. Thus, when ego concerns are muted, people tune in and learn from failure.
我们的社会将失败视为可以汲取教训的时刻。然而，在五项研究中（总计= 1674 人），失败产生了相反的效果：它破坏了学习。在所有研究中，参与者回答了二选一的问题，之后他们被告知自己答对了（成功反馈）或答错了（失败反馈）。两种类型的反馈都传达了正确答案，因为只有两个答案选择。然而，在后续测试中，参与者从失败反馈中学到的知识少于从成功反馈中学到的知识。这一效应在专业、语言和社会领域都得到了复制——即使从失败中学习的认知负担小于从成功中学习，即使学习是有奖励的。收到失败反馈的参与者也较少记住他们的答案选择。为什么失败会破坏学习？失败会威胁到自我，导致人们不予理会。参与者从个人失败中学到的知识少于从个人成功中学到的知识，但他们从他人的失败中学到的知识与从他人的成功中学到的知识一样多。因此，当自我意识减弱时，人们就会关注并从失败中学习。
