We like to believe failure is a stepping stone to success. Across 11 studies, people consistently overestimated how often someone who fails goes on to succeed, whether the failure was a licensing exam, a drug overdose or a heart attack.
The research was carried out by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell University, Eda Erensoy of Yale University and Minhee Kim of Columbia Business School. It was published online first on June 10, 2024, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Exams, overdoses and heart attacks
In the first study, 300 participants guessed how many professionals pass a licensing exam on retest after failing it. They estimated 58% for lawyers, against a real rate of 35%. For nurses they guessed 63% against 43%, and for teachers 67% against 58%. A second group guessed that 73% of students who fail the GED high school equivalency test eventually pass it; the real figure is 60%.
Health failures produced the same error. Participants told that a person with a substance use disorder had just survived an overdose estimated a 51% chance that he would enter treatment. The true rate after a recent overdose is 16.6%. Others believed 62% of heart attack survivors would make measurable lifestyle changes, while only 47% do.
Professionals were not immune. In a field study, oncology nurses at a virtual conference predicted whether colleagues who got a quiz question wrong would get it right on a retest. They predicted 86% would. In fact, 46% did.
Mentioning the failure creates the error
Two experiments pinned the bias on the failure itself. When participants estimated how many teachers would pass a licensing exam, those told about a previous failure guessed 70%. Those who were simply not told about it guessed 57%, close to the true 58%. In the overdose scenario, dropping the mention of the overdose cut the estimate from 51% to 33%.
The reason, the authors argue, is an “attention to failure gap.” Outsiders assume people who fail study their mistakes closely, but people tend to look away from bad news about themselves. In one study predictors overestimated both how much attention people paid to failure feedback and how well they did afterwards. Telling participants that only a minority of heart attack patients actively think about their heart problems lowered their estimate of lifestyle change from 62% to 52%.
The truth changes policy preferences
Correcting the error shifted opinions. When participants learned the real, low rate of recovery from opioid addiction, their support for channelling government money into treatment rose from 49% to 58% on the study’s scale. Learning true recidivism rates for robbery, larceny and burglary raised the share of a prison budget people would give to rehabilitation from 46% to 55%. Willingness to sign a petition for opioid rehabilitation reform also rose, from 36% to 39%.
The authors calculate that predictors in their studies imagined roughly 62,000 opioid overdose survivors seeking treatment each year in the United States, about double the real figure of approximately 30,000.
Study Details:
- Title: The exaggerated benefits of failure
- Authors: Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Kaitlin Woolley, Eda Erensoy, Minhee Kim
- Journal: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(7), 1920-1937
- Publication Date: June 10, 2024
- DOI: 10.1037/xge0001610