Failures Are Information: The Challenge is Discerning What They Mean

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• Professor Xiaodong Lin Siegler, Columbia University
• Friday 29 April 2022, 16:00-17:30
• Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Irum Maqbool.

Leo Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Tolstoy, 1973-1977/2018, Kindle Locations 296-297). A similar analogy can be made to success and failure. All successes imply that things have gone as planned and that one can proceed as one has intended. A failure, however, implies that things have not gone as planned and can have a variety of implications. For example, failure can be a sign to change direction, a teacher, or even a signal that one is on the path to success (Losse, 2016; Nazar & Bailis, 2013; Turner, 2003). A failure can also be perceived to have a variety of implications for both one’s own future and for the future of others. This suggests that failure offers us valuable information and opportunities. Much of the past research regarding the meanings that people ascribe to failure comes from attribution theory and implicit theories of intelligence literatures. We know a great deal about how failure influences perceptions of one’s own abilities. Without considering individual differences, failure is less likely than success to be attributed to effort (Nicholls, 1975). When working on a difficult task, helpless children are more likely than mastery-oriented children to make attributions to loss of ability (Diener & Dweck, 1978).

My work takes somewhat different route. I first demonstrate that learning about failure motivates students to do well in schools. I then take a bottom-up approach to examine how various individuals (e.g. high vs. low performing high school students, exceptional athletes and Nobel Laureates, etc) describe, label, and explain their own events of failure experiences (rather than perceived pre-defined causes and consequences of failure). Using personal story-telling approach to understand individual people’s failure experiences, esp. their conceptualization of such experiences, we can begin to understand how failures impact human’s emotions, cognition and behaviors, how various internal and external variables impact such emotional and behavioral reactions, and implications to design future psychology experiments and educational applications it offers. Although we are at infancy of this body of work, they may have applications and could lead to specific ways to intervene to help struggling students, business people, or the recently unemployed, and those experiencing divorce and separation. This work is an important first step in a greater understanding of the common human experience of failure.

This talk is part of the PELS: Psychology Education and Learning Studies series.

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