Why We Shouldn’t Romanticize Failure

Indeed, these days, the benefits of failure have taken on an almost mythical quality. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs openly aspire to “fail fast, fail often,” while an entire generation of athletes grew up with Michael Jordan’s mantra: “I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

But there’s a danger in looking at failure with success-tinted glasses.

“Teachers, coaches, and commencement speakers try to be inspirational when it comes to failure,” says Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. “But we find that being too inspirational—exaggerating the benefits of failure—is actually de-motivating. The takeaway is that when we talk about failure, we should aim to be accurate.”

Across seven studies, Eskreis-Winkler and her colleagues find that people consistently overestimate the chance of someone succeeding after an initial failure—a phenomenon that appears to derive, at least in part, from people’s inability to attend to their own mistakes. After all, who wants to interrogate their own personal failures too deeply?

This “failure gap” can be harmful for individuals, who may fail to adequately prepare for their next opportunity or take other steps to ensure they are learning from their mistakes. But it can also be devastating for communities, says Eskreis-Winkler.

“If you assume people are more resilient than they actually are, you help less,” she says. Halfway houses, addiction treatment programs, and recidivism programs all get short shrift if we believe that people struggling to get back on their feet don’t need the additional support.

Surely, this time we’ll succeed?

To be sure, failure really can be a step along the way to success. For instance, Kellogg researchers Yang Wang, Ben Jones, and Dashun Wang have found that scientists who had narrowly missed out on an important grant ended up achieving more professional success than those who’d narrowly received the grant. The act of failing can turn us into better versions of ourselves.

But the operative word here is can. Eskreis-Winkler and her colleagues Cornell’s Kaitlin Woolley, Yale’s Eda Erensoy, and Columbia’s Minhee Kim suspected that factors such as an optimism bias—a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones—could lead us to predict a higher chance of succeeding after failure than is actually accurate.

The researchers tested their hypothesis across several online studies.

In the first, 300 participants considered law-school graduates, nursing students, or education students who had failed their first attempt at a licensing test. What percentage of these students would go on to pass the same exam on their second try? Across all three professions, participants significantly overestimated the number of students who would pass the test on their second try—sometimes by a considerable amount. For instance, participants estimated that 58 percent of law students who’d failed their bar exam would pass on their second go-around, when the actual success rate is just 35 percent. A follow-up study found similar results for students who’d failed their initial attempt at the GED.

The (over)heralded benefits of failure

Where does this unrealistic optimism in the face of failure come from? Well, it seems to come in part from our ideas about failure itself.

In another study, participants were told that a student had scored 219 out of 300 points on a teacher’s licensing exam. Critically, only some of these participants were informed that 219 was a failing score. Participants who knew that the student had originally failed overestimated the likelihood they’d score higher on their next test, while participants who saw only the raw score (stripped of its failure context) did not.

Our beliefs about the upside of failure aren’t limited to more-traditional realms of achievement, either. Across the board, participants overestimated the likelihood that someone addicted to opioids would enter treatment—but their estimations were even more inflated for people who had just experienced a “failure” (a nonfatal drug overdose). In reality, people who’ve recently experienced an overdose are less likely to enter treatment.

This, of course, begs the question of why we are so confident that failure in particular begets success. And according to the research, it seems to arise from an inflated confidence that people will actively learn from their own mistakes.

In one study, for instance, a group of oncology nurses answered a quiz question like, “What percent of Americans believe that patients in clinical trials are not receiving the best possible care?” by choosing from two options. Those who responded incorrectly were told as much, giving them a chance to learn from their mistake; later, they were retested on the same information. Only about half of those who were retested responded correctly the second time around.

However, when another group of oncology nurses was asked to predict how many of their peers would learn from an incorrect initial response, this group estimated that about 86 percent would. (A follow-up study found that people did not overestimate the likelihood of learning from success—only from failure.)

“We overestimate resilience,” says Eskreis-Winkler. “We think people learn and grow from failure more than they actually do.”

Nothing to see here …

So what could be going on? What is it about failure that makes us think people will learn more from it than they are likely to?

The researchers hypothesized that much of it comes down to attention and, specifically, how uncomfortable it is to attend to our own failures. Viewed from the outside, failure offers a spectacular opportunity to reassess and grow. But for the people actually failing, well, that opportunity is a little less appetizing.

Indeed, another study found that participants overestimated how many people would solicit detailed feedback about their own mistakes. This in turn predicted their overestimation that people would succeed the next time around.

Still, when we are reminded just how rarely people attend to their mistakes, our estimations about their likelihood of future success become more accurate. When participants were asked to estimate the likelihood that a heart-attack survivor would feel motivated to make lifestyle changes, they predictably overestimated. However, those who were told that only a “small minority” of heart-attack survivors actively think about their health, their predictions were less inflated.

Social implications of overestimating success

Our collective tendency to overestimate how much people will learn from their mistakes could have widespread consequences, influencing public policy in ways that make success less likely.

Such is the finding of the researchers’ final study, in which 200 participants were directly asked how much tax-dollar funding should go to programs that help people recovering from opioid addiction stay in recovery. Half were told the sobering reality that just 9 percent of people new to recovery avoided relapsing in the first year, while the rest were left to imagine a (presumably far higher) recovery rate. Sharing information about the low success rate boosted the participants’ support for the programs. Similar results, using slightly different methods, were obtained for rehabilitation programs for formerly incarcerated people.

Knowing all this, how should we think about failure? “With open eyes,” says Eskreis-Winkler. “Our paper suggests that believing too strongly in failure’s benefits has the same negative consequences as fearing failure: people disengage from the experience.”

Instead, she argues, people should “adopt a more clear-eyed view of the truth. This motivates people to tune in to failure and learn and grow from the experience.”

This is true for individuals, who could probably benefit from attending carefully to the reason for their failure, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them. But it is also true for communities, she explains. “This misbelief undermines the motivation to invest taxpayer dollars in all sorts of programs.”