When we fail, we tell ourselves there’s a silver lining: that failure is a necessary stepping stone for success. Thomas Edison wrote that he failed his way to success. J.K. Rowling’s Harvard commencement speech on failure went viral, while Steve Jobs warned, “If you are afraid of failure, you won’t get very far.”
However, a new paper, The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, suggests this may be baloney and that failure typically begets failure.
The researchers ran 11 different sets of studies looking at failure in different domains, from passing exams and mistakes at work to health problems.
The researchers found that people tend to overestimate someone’s likelihood of achieving success after they’ve failed. In one set of studies, the researchers asked participants to predict the likelihood someone would pass an exam after they’d failed it. They found that participants overestimated how often test takers would succeed on their retake.
Also, they found nurses overestimated how much their colleagues would succeed after a professional failure. In addition, people also overestimated how likely heart patients are to make lifestyle changes after a medical emergency.
The researchers then removed any mention of failure from people’s records. In one study, researchers stripped away from their records all mentions that someone had failed a test. In another study, the researchers removed references to a drug overdose from people’s records. In both cases, participants lowered their prediction of whether or not someone would achieve success—and their lowered predictions were more accurate.
The researchers also found that our tendency to overestimate success after failure has policy implications. People who believe failure begets success are less likely to support drug-recovery programs. However, when people learn the true rates of failure, they are more likely to support drug-recovery programs or other programs like prison reforms.
“These results have implications for how we treat professional failures, repeat offenders, people with addiction, and anyone else—which is to say, everyone else—who struggles to learn from failure,” the researchers wrote.