WHY IT’S SO HARD TO LEARN FROM YOUR OWN MISTAKES? (SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION)

Tue 21 March 2023:

Do you learn from mistakes? This is especially true when it comes to learning from other people’s mistakes. Your own, on the other hand, are often ignored. But why?

You learn less from your own mistakes than from your own successes. Only when it comes to other people’s victories and defeats you do benefit equally from both, scientists say.

Psychologists Lauren Eskreis-Winkler from Northwestern University and Ayelet Fishbach from the University of Chicago described this phenomenon in their study appearing in the journal “Perspectives on Psychological Science”.

Back in 2019, the authors of this study had shown in a series of investigations with more than 1,600 subjects that negative feedback hinders learning – even if a reward is tempting.

The subjects who participated in the study were always asked to choose between two alternative answers to a question. Then, by chance, they were either told that they were right or that they were wrong.

In both cases, they knew which answer was correct.

Then another test followed with the same content, but worded in reverse. For example, the question “Which of these two ancient characters depicts an animal?” in the second test was “Which of these two ancient characters does not depict an animal?”

Result: After feedback of success, the subjects in the second round knew the correct answer to the question with the same content on average 80 percent.

After a failure report, they only got around 60 percent – they had learned less from it. A similar effect was shown for questions about pictures of people (“Are these two people a couple?”) and for professionally relevant questions.

Furthermore, the participants remembered the two alternative answers less after their failures (59 percent) than when they received no feedback at all (94 percent). But if they didn’t answer the questions themselves in the first round, but were presented with right and wrong answers by other people, they drew just as much information from their mistakes as from their successes.

As soon as it wasn’t about one’s own person, a mistake was apparently no longer a barrier to learning.

A mistake threatens the ego

Later, the psychologists analyzed the causes.

The conclusion was: Learning from your own mistakes is exhausting.

For one thing, failure threatens the ego, and in order to protect it, attention is drawn away from it.

Second, people prefer to process information that is consistent with their beliefs and expectations and ignore those that contradict them—a common error of judgment known as confirmation bias. In addition, the information contained in failure is not always obvious. You have to think outside the box and conclude the right thing from the wrong.

But that gets you in your own way. Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach write that those who are able to learn from failures increase their chances of future success.

What makes it easier to learn from your own mistakes?

Scientists recommend leaving the ego outside. The following techniques could be used for this purpose:

Learn to deal with your own mistakes when learning from the mistakes of others.
Engage in constructive self-talk: this should facilitate the analysis of your own failures.
Strengthen your own self-esteem in the long term so that the ego can deal with a setback calmly.
A different failure culture could be yet another strategy: realizing that failure is human and that every failure is another opportunity to learn something – and to fail better and better, thus gradually improving yourself.

According to the psychologists, this is a skill that can be learned and practiced just like other things which we learn in our lifetime.

This article was originally published in Technology.Org

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