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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 23, 2025

Problem-Solving Before Instruction PS-I: A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities

Problem-Solving Before Instruction PS-I: A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities

Published on: September 11, 2021

You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler¹, Ayelet Fishbach²

¹Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science

|May 17, 2022

Summary

Learning from failure is difficult due to emotional and cognitive barriers. Overcoming these barriers unlocks high-quality insights for future success.

Keywords:

barriers failure learning motivation

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Cognitive Science
Behavioral Economics

Background:

Societal emphasis on failure as a learning opportunity contrasts with research indicating learning from failure is challenging.
Existing research highlights difficulties in extracting actionable insights from unsuccessful experiences.

Approach:

A unifying framework is presented to explain the emotional and cognitive barriers hindering learning from failure.
The framework identifies ego-threat from failure and cognitive difficulties in processing indirect information as key impediments.

Key Points:

Emotional responses to failure, such as ego-protection, lead individuals to avoid confronting negative outcomes.
Cognitive challenges arise because information derived from failure is less explicit than that from success.
Failure contains valuable, high-quality data crucial for predicting future successes.

Conclusions:

Addressing emotional and cognitive barriers is essential for effective learning from failure.
Recognizing and analyzing information within failures can significantly improve predictive accuracy for subsequent endeavors.
Overlooking failure's informational content results in missed opportunities for growth and improved performance prediction.