Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago’s Booth School gave subjects an extremely hard test, asking them to choose one of two possible answers for each question. Half the subjects then received feedback on what they’d gotten right (success feedback) and the others on what they’d gotten wrong (failure feedback). Though all received full information on which answers were correct, in follow-up tests the people given success feedback were able to answer the same questions accurately, but those given failure feedback had learned much less—and often nothing. The conclusion: Maybe failure isn’t the best teacher.
A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review.
