How often have I heard that it’s important to learn how to fail and that failure can be a good thing? Or, even worse, that failure leads to success? A new study suggests that this last platitude may be inaccurate and even potentially damaging to society.

The study in short:

Our culture teaches that failure has, at least, one silver lining: It is a steppingstone to success. Is it? Across 11 studies, people in the lab and professionals in the field overestimated the rate at which health failures, professional failures, educational failures, and failures in a real-time task were followed by success. People thought that tens of thousands of professionals who fail standardized tests would go on to pass (who do not), that tens of thousands of people with addiction would get sober (who do not), and that tens of thousands of heart failure patients would improve their health (in fact, they do not). Overestimating success following failure had key policy implications. Apprising citizens of the true, lower-than-expected rate at which success occurs on the heels of failure increased support for policy initiatives aimed at helping criminals and people in the throes of drug addiction learn and grow from past mistakes.

From the press release:

Researchers conducted 11 experiments with more than 1,800 participants across many domains and compared national statistics to the participants’ responses. In one experiment, 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,” said lead researcher Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, PhD, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University. “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.”

In some experiments, participants wrongly assumed that people pay attention to their mistakes and learn from them. In one field test, nurses overestimated how much their colleagues would learn from a past error. The research was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

“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.”

While telling people they will succeed after failure may make them feel better, that mindset can have damaging real-world consequences, Eskreis-Winkler said. In one experiment, participants assumed that heart patients would embrace healthier lifestyles when many of them don’t.

“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?”

However, people may recalibrate their expectations when given information about the negligible benefits of failure. In two experiments, participants were more supportive of taxpayer funding for rehabilitation programs for former inmates and drug treatment programs when they learned about the low rates of success for people using those programs.

“Correcting our misguided beliefs about failure could help shift taxpayer dollars away from punishment toward rehabilitation and reform,” Eskreis-Winkler said.

Abstract of the study:

Commencement speakers, business leaders, and the popular press tell us that failure has at least one benefit: It fuels success. Does it? Across 11 studies, including a field study of medical professionals, predictors overestimated the rate at which people course correct following failure (Studies 1–4). Predictors overestimated the likelihood that professionals who fail a professional exam (e.g., the bar exam, the medical boards) pass a retest (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2a), the likelihood that patients improve their health after a crisis (e.g., heart attack, drug overdose; Studies 2b and 6), and the probability, more generally, of learning from one’s mistakes (Studies 3–5). This effect was specific to overestimating success following failure (Study 4) and erasing mention of an initial failure that had actually occurred corrected the problem (Studies 2a and 2b). The success overestimate was due, at least in part, to the belief that people attend to failure more than they do (Studies 5 and 6). Correcting this overestimate had policy implications. Citizens apprised of the sobering true rate of postfailure success increased their support for rehabilitative initiatives aimed at helping struggling populations (e.g., people with addiction, ex-convicts) learn from past mistakes (Studies 7a–7c).