The smart way to learn from failure

Many of us make mistakes on endless repeat – but new insights can help us to learn valuable lessons from our failures.

In today’s motivational literature, failure is often viewed as something to be celebrated. Disappointments are an essential stepping stone to success; a turning point in our life story that will ultimately end in triumph. Rather than falling into despair, we are encouraged to “fail forward”.

If only it were so simple. In the past decade, a wealth of psychological research has shown that most people struggle to handle failure constructively. Instead, we find ways to devalue the task at which we failed, meaning that we may be less motivated to persevere and reach our goal. This phenomenon is known as the “sour-grape effect”. Alternatively, we may simply fail to notice our errors and blithely continue as if nothing has happened, something that prevents us from learning a better strategy to improve our performance in the future.

Inspirational speakers are fond of quoting the words of the novelist Samuel Beckett: “Fail again. Fail better”. But the truth is that most of us fail again and fail the same.

Recent research shows there are ways to avoid these traps. These solutions are often counterintuitive: one of the best ways of learning from your mistakes, for example, is to offer advice to another person who may be encountering similar challenges. By helping others avoid failure, it turns out, you can also enhance your own prospects of success.

The ‘sour-grape effect’

Let’s first examine the sour-grape effect, discovered by Hallgeir Sjåstad, a professor of psychology and leadership at the Norwegian School of Economics, and colleagues.

He says he was intrigued by people’s tendency to abandon their dreams prematurely. “The research was an attempt to understand why we sometimes give up too early, even though we could have succeeded if we had been a bit more patient and willing to give it a second try,” he says. 

In his first experiment, Sjåstad asked participants to take a practice trial of a test said to measure the precision of their intuition. They were asked to estimate how much 20 apples would weigh, for example – and they were told that a guess falling within 10% of the real answer would be considered a sign of strong intuition. High performance on several questions, they were told, correlated strongly to “positive outcomes in life, such as extraordinary achievements in work and a well-functioning social life” – a message that was designed to increase their desire to succeed. 

After answering a couple of practice questions, the participants were given sham feedback – either very positive or very negative. They were then asked to predict how difficult it would be to perform well in the real test, and how happy they would feel if they scored 100%.

Sjåstad hypothesised that the people who were given negative feedback about their practice answers would underestimate the importance of their future performance for their emotional state. And this was exactly what happened. The people who felt they’d failed on the practice run predicted that a perfect score would do little to increase their immediate happiness. Crucially, this did not turn out to be true; when they took a second test and were told they received top marks, the good news really did make them happy. They had been completely wrong in assuming that the result would not make them proud.

Sjåstad says this is self-protective. “Most of us want to think of ourselves as competent and capable people, so when external feedback suggests otherwise, it poses a serious threat to that self-image,” he says. “The easiest way out is to deny or explain away the external signal, so we can reduce the inconsistency and preserve a positive sense of self. I think we do this all time, even without noticing.” (It’s worth noting that after each of these experiments, Sjåstad debriefed his participants, so they did not leave with a false impression of their intuitive abilities.)

In a subsequent experiment, Sjåstad explored how failure in the practice questions influenced participants’ other judgements of the test results’ importance to their lives. Once again, he saw clear signs of sour grapes: after participants had received the negative feedback, they were much less likely to say that the test results reflected “who [they] were, as a person”, or believe that their intuitive intelligence would determine their future success in life.

He has also tested the sour-grape effect in real life, among students at a Norwegian university. He found that simply reminding students of a currently low grade-point average led the students to significantly devalue the predicted benefits of graduating with an A average.

Sjåstad suspects that the sour-grape effect could influence motivation in many areas of life. If you have one bad interview for your dream job, you might decide you don’t really want to work in that field after all, and so you stop applying for similar positions. The same goes if you fail to impress at a sports trial, or if a publisher rejects the first submission of your manuscript.

“It might be tempting to explain away our shortcomings and blame someone or something else, trying to convince ourselves that our ‘Plan C’ was actually our ‘Plan A’ all along,” he says.

Sjåstad isn’t claiming that we should persevere in all our goals all the time; it can be healthy to put ambitions in perspective and change course if the process is no longer making us happy. But the sour-grape effect may lead us to come to this decision prematurely, he says, rather than seeing whether we might learn and improve.

The ‘ostrich effect’

Devaluing the source of your disappointment is just one way your mind may avoid coping constructively with failure; another coping mechanism is to hide your head in the sand, shifting your attention away from the upsetting situation so that you don’t have to process it.

Researchers have long known that we often turn a blind eye to incoming bad news. Economists, for instance, have found that investors are less likely to check their financial status when their fortunes are falling rather than rising. 

This phenomenon has been called the “ostrich effect”, and it may be an example of a far wider tendency to overlook negative information, according to a series of recent studies by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organisations at Northwestern University, US, and Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioural science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Much of their research has centred around an experimental set-up called the “Facing Failure game”, in which participants were presented with a series of either-or questions. They were presented with pairs of symbols resembling hieroglyphs, for example, and asked to guess which one represented an animal, for example.

After giving their answers, they were told whether they were right or wrong. Since there were only two choices, either form of feedback – positive or negative – should have helped them to learn the correct answer, so that they could perform better on a subsequent test. And there was a small financial incentive to do so: they would receive $1.50 for each symbol that they remembered in the next round.

Most people successfully remembered their correct answers. Quite astonishingly, however, they failed to learn from mistaken answers, and performed no better than chance on these items. “People often didn’t learn anything,” says Fishbach.

To investigate the reasons for this phenomenon, the researchers asked a further group of participants to view someone else’s answers to a round of the Facing Failure game. In these cases, the “observers” seemed perfectly able to infer the correct responses from the other player’s wrong answers and to remember them later. “This suggests that the task is not so hard, cognitively,” says Fishbach. Instead, it seems to be the hurt feelings of being wrong themselves that acted as the barrier to learning for the people actually playing the game. Rather than confronting the mistake, participants who had got the answer wrong let their attention slip away, without encoding the correct answer in their memory. 

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach have now rolled out the Facing Failure game in many different contexts, including to groups of telemarketers, who were given the chance to learn useful information about their profession. In each case, the participants were perfectly capable of remembering their successes, but learnt almost nothing from their mistakes.

Fishbach has a light-hearted tone when she discusses these results, but she believes that they represent a serious challenge for our personal growth. “I laugh because I’ve been doing this research for a while, but it is quite depressing,” she admits.

Failing constructively 

Fortunately, Fishbach’s research with Eskreis-Winkler suggests that there are some strategies to overcome the emotional barriers to confronting failure.

The first is a process called ‘self-distancing’, in which you adopt a third-person perspective. Instead of asking “Why did I fail?” I might ask “Why did David fail?”, for example. Multiple studies by psychologist Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan show that self-distancing helps to soften our negative emotional reactions, allowing us to view upsetting events more objectively. In this case, it should mean that the failure feels less threatening to the ego, so that we can better analyse the reasons for the disappointment – without having sour grapes or defensively hiding our heads in the sand.

A second strategy involves offering advice to others who may be in the same position as you, which Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach tested with Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. They found that the satisfaction of helping another person provides a personal ego boost, so that people feel more confident to confront their own failures. “It forces people to engage with their experience and what they have learned,” says Fishbach. 

People who were struggling with weight loss, for example, wrote out tips based on their own failures for other people trying to stick to a diet. Afterwards, they felt more motivated to continue pursuing their own weight goal. Middle-school students, meanwhile, were asked to describe ways to overcome a lack of academic motivation to another, younger student; over the next four weeks, they overcame their own procrastination and completed significantly more homework, compared to students who had instead received a letter giving advice.

Sjåstad points out that failures are an inevitable part of life. “If you never fail, you’re probably aiming too low,” he says. And by learning to confront the disappointment and learn from their lessons, you may find the road to success a little easier to navigate. 

David Robson is a science writer and author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, published by Canongate (UK) and Henry Holt (USA) in early 2022. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.