Evidence for A balanced view of failure #

Every substantive claim on the A balanced view of failure page is checked against current research. Here is each claim, how well today’s evidence supports it, and the sources. The full, de-duplicated source list lives on the references page.

Supported · moderate evidence — People often fail to learn from failure: when given only failure feedback rather than only success feedback, they remember and retain less of the correct information, even though failure feedback carries enough information to identify the right answer.

Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach’s experiments in Psychological Science directly show that participants learned less from failure than from informationally-equivalent success feedback; the finding is well known and conceptually replicated across their studies, though it is one research line and the magnitude varies with how high the stakes and ego involvement are.

Sources: Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach (2019), Not learning from failure—the greatest failure of all, Psychological Science — https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619881133 · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Failure is ego-threatening, and the natural response is to disengage or tune out, which is a key reason people do not extract the lesson that the failure contains.

Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach attribute reduced learning from failure to its ego threat and consequent tuning-out, and showed that lowering the self-relevance of the failure (e.g. observing others fail) restored learning; this ego-protective mechanism is consistent with the broader self-threat and feedback literatures.

Sources: Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach (2019), Not learning from failure—the greatest failure of all, Psychological Science — https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619881133 · Sedikides (2021), In Search of Narcissus (self-protection and self-enhancement review), Trends in Cognitive Sciences — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.10.010 · full reference ›

Supported · strong evidence — Feedback directed at the self or person rather than at the task tends to be ineffective or even harmful for learning, so framing a setback as information about the attempt rather than a verdict on the learner matters.

Kluger & DeNisi’s meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes found that feedback cueing attention to the self was among the least effective and roughly a third of feedback interventions reduced performance; Hattie & Timperley reach the same conclusion. Reframing failure as task-level information rather than self-evaluation is well supported by this robust literature.

Sources: Kluger & DeNisi (1996), The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory, Psychological Bulletin — https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254 · Hattie & Timperley (2007), The power of feedback, Review of Educational Research — https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Knowing merely that an attempt failed is far less useful for learning than knowing specifically what went wrong; informative feedback that supports a next step drives larger learning gains than bare verification.

Shute’s review of formative feedback and Wisniewski, Zierer & Hattie’s 2020 meta-analysis both find that high-information feedback (elaborated, explaining what to do next) outperforms simple verification or knowledge-of-result; the value of specific over bare feedback is well established, with effect sizes moderated by task and learner.

Sources: Shute (2008), Focus on formative feedback, Review of Educational Research — https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654307313795 · Wisniewski, Zierer & Hattie (2020), The power of feedback revisited: A meta-analysis of educational feedback research, Frontiers in Psychology — https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03087 · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Deliberately reflecting on an experience—what happened, why, and what to change—improves subsequent learning and performance compared with experience alone.

Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano & Staats found that adding structured reflection to practice produced significantly better performance than additional practice alone, and reflective-practice and after-action-review evidence broadly supports the benefit of articulating lessons; effects are reliable though dependent on the quality of reflection.

Supported · moderate evidence — Success and positive feedback are also genuine sources of learning, carrying information about what to keep doing without the ego threat that makes failure easy to ignore.

The same Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach studies show success feedback produced more learning than failure feedback precisely because it was less ego-threatening, and the feedback literature treats verification of correct responses as informative; the claim that success teaches and does so with less self-threat is well grounded.

Sources: Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach (2019), Not learning from failure—the greatest failure of all, Psychological Science — https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619881133 · Hattie & Timperley (2007), The power of feedback, Review of Educational Research — https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 · full reference ›

Mixed · moderate evidence — The popular notion that failure automatically teaches you and is the necessary secret of success overstates the case; failure is one source of learning among several and only instructs when framed, fed back, and reflected on well.

Evidence qualifies the slogan: failure can aid learning (errorful generation and productive-failure research show benefits under the right conditions) but frequently does not, because of disengagement, so its instructiveness is conditional rather than automatic. Treating failure as one conditional input alongside success reflects the mixed picture honestly.

Sources: Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach (2019), Not learning from failure—the greatest failure of all, Psychological Science — https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619881133 · Kapur (2016), Examining Productive Failure, Productive Success, Unproductive Failure, and Unproductive Success in Learning, Educational Psychologist — https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1155457 · full reference ›

Supported · weak evidence — Repeating the same approach after a failure, without varying it or examining what went wrong, tends not to produce improvement.

This follows from the reflection and feedback evidence—gains come from extracting and acting on the lesson rather than from raw repetition—but it is stated here as general practical principle rather than from a single direct experiment isolating unvaried repetition, so the strength is modest.

Sources: Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano & Staats (2016), Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning, Harvard Business School working paper — https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=43592 · Ericsson & Pool (2016), Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (deliberate practice requires focused correction, not mere repetition) · full reference ›