Learning from failure is like learning from unsolicited advice

Learning from failure is much like learning from unsolicited advice: a person may learn, only hardly enough. People learn less from failure than from success. Yet, they learn more from failure than from instruction alone, especially when they are confident in their ability to learn. These patterns hold whether failure carries more, the same amount of, or less objective information than success. To improve learning from failure, most interventions target the emotional barrier: the sting of failure. Far fewer address the cognitive barrier: learning from failure requires switching one's understanding of the world, which is more complex than simply repeating what worked in the past. Encouraging people to begin with a mistake (e.g., a "silly" answer) and post-failure, giving advice to another person, are some interventions that help overcome both the emotional and cognitive barriers to learning.