Failure doesn’t always lead to success, and assuming otherwise can cause problems Many don’t learn from failures It can be counterproductive to expect people to gain knowledge from mistakes TUESDAY, June 11, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Winston Churchill once said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” It’s one of countless platitudes claiming that failure leads to success. But there’s strong evidence that such a notion is wrongheaded and can lead to terrible real-world consequences, researchers said in a new report.
In fact, many people do not learn from their failures, and it’s folly to expect otherwise, according to findings published June 10 in the . “People often confuse what is with what ought to be,” lead researcher , an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University, said in a news release. “People ought to pay attention and learn from failure, but often they don’t because failure is demotivating and ego-threatening.
” A series of 11 experiments involving more than 1,800 participants found that people often don’t gain wisdom from failure, and that expecting them to do so can have potentially terrible consequences: People vastly overestimated the percentage of prospective nurses, lawyers and teachers who pass licensing exams after previously failing them. Nurses tended to overestimate how much colleagues would learn from a past error. People assumed that heart patients would .