Failure Doesn’t Teach

Sitting with all these conundrums in the early days of developing the Never-Fail Method, I came across an article and a challenge. Someone (I don’t remember who) was offering a cash reward to anyone who could prove to him that people learned from failure. The title of the article was “Failure Doesn’t Teach,” and the premise was that there was no research to support the common belief that we learn from our mistakes, or that every mistake is an opportunity for learning. I seized upon the article as support for my intuition.

Some Current Research

More current research supports the premise that pointing out errors does not promote learning, because when you point out learners’ errors, they cannot pay attention to your explanations. Feelings of stupidity and shame, for example, use up whatever psychic energy they may have had for learning. Pointing out errors makes people tune out. I want learners to tune in.

In a 2019 study, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach gave multiple choice tests to research participants. They told some of the test takers which answers they had answered correctly (success feedback). They told other test takers which ones they had answered incorrectly (failure feedback). Both sets of learners got full information on what the correct answer was. When tested later on the same information, those who had been told what they did right scored higher than those who were told what they did wrong. 

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach explain that “our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment,” yet in five studies (total N = 1,674), failure did the opposite: It undermined learning (page 1).

Across five studies, participants learned less from failure feedback than from success feedback—even when both types of feedback contained full information on the correct answer. Failure feedback undermined learning motivation because it was ego threatening: It caused participants to tune out and stop processing information. (page 8)