By John Salak –
There are endless quotes on the benefits of failure, which has made falling short a badge of honor and, ironically, an achievement for many.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan noted “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Industrialist Henry Ford chimed in with “One who fears failure limits his activities.” President Barrack Obama tossed in his thoughts with “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
Flourish Australia, a mental well-being site, summarized the long-held benefits of failure as making people smarter, work harder, become humbler and increasingly embrace simplicity.
It’s obviously hard to argue with these and other heavyweights about the character-building benefits of falling short. A team of researchers from Northwestern University is doing just that. In fact, they are arguing that the idea that failure ultimately leads to success may not only be inaccurate, but it may also actually damage society.
Their position was developed after conducting 11 experiments involving more than 1,800 participants across various situations and then comparing national statistics to the participants’ responses. In one experiment, for example, participants vastly overestimated the percentage of prospective nurses, lawyers and teachers who pass licensing exams after previously failing them.
“People expect success to follow failure much more often than it actually does,” reported lead researcher Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, PhD, a Northwestern assistant professor. “People usually assume that past behavior predicts future behavior, so it’s surprising that we often believe the opposite when it comes to succeeding after failure.”
The study also found that participants wrongly assumed that people pay attention to their mistakes and learn from them. Nurses in one test demonstrated this by overestimating how much their colleagues would learn from a past error.
“People often confuse what is with what ought to be,” Eskreis-Winkler said. “People ought to pay attention and learn from failure, but often they don’t because failure is demotivating and ego-threatening.”
The greater danger, however, may come in misleading people over failure’s benefits. Ultimately, telling people they will succeed after failure may make them feel better, but that mindset can have damaging real-world consequences, Eskreis-Winkler warned.
One experiment underscored this when participants assumed that heart patients would embrace healthier lifestyles after their condition was noted. Many of them didn’t, potentially threatening to misplace resources.
“People who believe that problems will self-correct after failure are less motivated to help those in need,” Estreis-Winkler said. “Why would we invest time or money to help struggling populations if we erroneously believe that they will right themselves?”
The good news from the researchers’ standpoint is that people may recalibrate their expectations when they realize there are negligible benefits of failure.
They cited two experiments where participants became more supportive of taxpayer funding for rehabilitation programs for former inmates and drug treatment programs when they learned of the low success rates of these programs.
“Correcting our misguided beliefs about failure could help shift taxpayer dollars away from punishment toward rehabilitation and reform,” Eskreis-Winkler explained.
