Eskreis-Winkler Lauren, Fishbach Ayelet
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2022 Nov;17(6):1511-1524. doi: 10.1177/17456916211059817. Epub 2022 May 17.
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.
社会将失败视为一个可从中学习的时刻而加以颂扬。但人们真的能从失败中吸取教训吗？尽管常识表明人们应该能，但一项研究综述显示这很难做到。我们提出了一个统一的框架，该框架指出了导致从失败中学习困难的情感和认知障碍。情感会破坏学习，因为人们觉得失败会威胁到自我。人们往往会回避失败，不去关注它以保护自己的自尊心。在认知方面，人们也会遇到困难，因为失败中的信息不如成功中的信息直接，因此更难提取。除了识别障碍，这个框架还提出了可能克服这些障碍的途径。最后，我们探讨其影响。我们概述了人们忽视失败中的信息时究竟错过了什么。我们发现失败中的信息往往是高质量的信息，可用于预测成功。
