Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. Yet in five studies (total N = 1,674), failure did the opposite: It undermined learning. Across studies, participants answered binary-choice ...questions, following which they were told they answered correctly (success feedback) or incorrectly (failure feedback). Both types of feedback conveyed the correct answer, because there were only two answer choices. However, on a follow-up test, participants learned less from failure feedback than from success feedback. This effect was replicated across professional, linguistic, and social domains—even when learning from failure was less cognitively taxing than learning from success and even when learning was incentivized. Participants who received failure feedback also remembered fewer of their answer choices. Why does failure undermine learning? Failure is ego threatening, which causes people to tune out. Participants learned less from personal failure than from personal success, yet they learned just as much from other people’s failure as from others’ success. Thus, when ego concerns are muted, people tune in and learn from failure.
Society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. But do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard. We ...present a unifying framework that points to emotional and cognitive barriers that make learning from failure difficult. Emotions undermine learning because people find failure ego-threatening. People tend to look away from failure and not pay attention to it to protect their egos. Cognitively, people also struggle because the information in failure is less direct than the information in success and thus harder to extract. Beyond identifying barriers, this framework suggests inroads by which barriers might be addressed. Finally, we explore implications. We outline what, exactly, people miss out on when they overlook the information in failure. We find that the information in failure is often high-quality information that can be used to predict success.
Remaining committed to goals is necessary (albeit not sufficient) to attaining them, but very little is known about domain-general individual differences that contribute to sustained goal commitment. ...The current investigation examines the association between grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, other individual difference variables, and retention in four different contexts: the military, workplace sales, high school, and marriage. Grit predicted retention over and beyond established context-specific predictors of retention (e.g., intelligence, physical aptitude, Big Five personality traits, job tenure) and demographic variables in each setting. Grittier soldiers were more likely to complete an Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) selection course, grittier sales employees were more likely to keep their jobs, grittier students were more likely to graduate from high school, and grittier men were more likely to stay married. The relative predictive validity of grit compared to other traditional predictors of retention is examined in each of the four studies. These findings suggest that in addition to domain-specific influences, there may be domain-general individual differences which influence commitment to diverse life goals over time.
Typically, individuals struggling with goal achievement seek advice. However, in the present investigation (N = 2,274), struggling individuals were more motivated by giving advice than receiving it. ...In a randomized, controlled, double-blind field experiment, middle-school students who gave motivational advice to younger students spent more time on homework over the following month than students who received motivational advice from expert teachers (Experiment 1). This phenomenon was replicated across self-regulatory domains: Strugglers who gave advice, compared with those who received expert advice, were more motivated to save money, control their tempers, lose weight, and seek employment (Experiments 2 and 3). Nevertheless, across domains, people erroneously predicted the opposite, expecting themselves and others to be less motivated by giving advice than receiving it (Experiments 2 and 3). Why are people blind to the motivational power of giving? Giving advice motivated givers by raising their confidence—a reality that predictors fail to anticipate (Experiment 4).
Self-control refers to the alignment of thoughts, feelings, and actions with enduringly valued goals in the face of momentarily more alluring alternatives. In this review, we examine the role of ...self-control in academic achievement. We begin by defining self-control and distinguishing it from related constructs. Next, we summarize evidence that nearly all students experience conflict between academic goals that they value in the long run and nonacademic goals that they find more gratifying in the moment. We then turn to longitudinal evidence relating self-control to academic attainment, course grades, and performance on standardized achievement tests. We use the process model of self-control to illustrate how impulses are generated and regulated, emphasizing opportunities for students to deliberately strengthen impulses that are congruent with, and dampen impulses that are incongruent with, academic goals. Finally, we conclude with future directions for both science and practice.
We present a new consequence of stereotypes: they affect the length of communications. People say more about events that violate common stereotypes than those that confirm them, a phenomenon we dub ...surprised elaboration. Across two public data sets, government officials wrote longer reports when negative events befell White people (stereotype-inconsistent) than when the same events befell Black or Hispanic people (stereotype-consistent). Officers authored longer missing child reports of White (vs. Black or Hispanic) children (Study 1a), and medical examiners wrote longer reports of unidentified White (vs. Black or Hispanic) bodies (Study 1b). In follow-up experiments, communicators found stereotype-inconsistent events more surprising and this prompted them to elaborate (Study 2). Surprised elaboration occurred for negative events (i.e., crimes, misdemeanors) and also positive ones (i.e., weddings; Study 3). We found that surprised elaboration has policy implications. Observers preferred to funnel government and media resources toward White victims, since their case reports were longer, even when longer reports were not more informative (Studies 4-6). Together, these studies introduce surprised elaboration, a new theoretical phenomenon with implications for public policy.
Hidden failures Eskreis-Winkler, Lauren; Fishbach, Ayelet
Organizational behavior and human decision processes,
03/2020, Letnik:
157
Journal Article
Recenzirano
•People do not realize that failures contain useful information.•Therefore, people undershare failures in and beyond organizations settings.•Highlighting the information in failure makes people more ...likely to share it.
Failure often contains useful information, yet across five studies involving 11 separate samples (N = 1238), people were reluctant to share this information with others. First, using a novel experimental paradigm, we found that participants consistently undershared failure—relative to success and a no-feedback experience—even though failure contained objectively more information than these comparison experiences. Second, this reluctance to share failure generalized to professional experiences. Teachers in the field were less likely to share information gleaned from failure than information gleaned from success, and employees were less likely to share lessons gleaned from failed versus successful attempts to concentrate at work. Why are people reluctant to share failure? Across experimental and professional failures, people did not realize that failure contained useful information. The current investigation illuminates an erroneous belief and the asymmetrical world of information it produces: one where failures are common in private, but hidden in public.
The exaggerated benefits of failure Eskreis-Winkler, Lauren; Woolley, Kaitlin; Erensoy, Eda ...
Journal of experimental psychology. General,
06/2024
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
Measuring Grit Schmidt, Fabian T. C.; Fleckenstein, Johanna; Retelsdorf, Jan ...
European journal of psychological assessment : official organ of the European Association of Psychological Assessment,
05/2019, Letnik:
35, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The construct grit originates from
positive psychology and describes an individual's tendency to
persistently pursue long-term goals despite challenges or obstacles. Previous
research has shown that ...domain-general grit is a predictor of educational and
vocational success. The present research aimed to establish and validate a
German version of the Short Grit Scale by Duckworth and Quinn (2009), named the BISS-8
(Beharrlichkeit and Beständiges
Interesse) Scale, and to test for the
domain specificity of grit in an educational context. We conducted three studies
to investigate the BISS-8 Scale: in Study 1
(N = 525 university students) confirmatory factor
analyses (CFAs) replicated a two-dimensional higher-order structure for the
scale. Study 2 (N = 173 university students)
investigated the correlations of grit with external criteria such as grade point
average (GPA), generalized self-efficacy, general academic self-concept, and
personality traits. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 271
high school students), we found differential correlations with school
achievement for domain-specific grit. Moreover, the validity of the BISS-8 Scale
was also supported for adolescents by replicating the measurement model. All in
all, our results indicate the validity of the BISS-8 Scale and show the
importance to account for grit in different domains.
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