Why does failure inspire some and demoralize others?
from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Stanford Magazine reports on the applications from psychological research Carol Dweck’s work, which uses careful experiments to determine why some people give up when confronted with failure, while others roll up their sleeves and dive in.
Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.
Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use…
…[S]ome of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”
Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized—and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated—that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”
I ask for your thoughts. I very much agree with this. I think that probably the single most important idea that has shaped my life is how I process events – the struggling I went through as a pre-teen when it came to “social failure” (and how hard I took it), and the ease in which I accepted and adapted to “intellectual failure” (or challenges). As I got older, I stopped seeing that social awkwardness as a shame-inducing failure, and started asking myself how I could change my pattern and perspective.
Man, if only I’d been able to do that a decade earlier. *chuckle*
how interesting. luciferian’s been posting links to similar, by malcolm gladwell. mastery and more mastery.
Oddly enough, we teach aspects of attribution theory in our EDUC122: Computer Games and Education paper at my university, along with a few other useful bits of educational cognitive psychology like self-efficacy and flow theories. While it’s good for people who want to become teachers to know about how people learn, I think the course has added benefits to our students in understanding how their own learning processes work, too.
With attribution, one thing you can do is classify attributions according to three factors: locus (internal or external), stability (constant or changing) and control (whether it can be influenced by the learner). A learner’s ability, for example, is internal, stable (at least relatively constant), and uncontrollable (because we can’t choose to suddenly be better at things).
One of the things that’s been observed is that students who attribute their failure to stable causes are more likely to give up, whereas unstable attributions (like effort or luck) tend to keep students trying for longer. If you think that you’re not good enough, or that a task is simply too difficult, it’s hard to motivate you.
Another important factor is feedback, of course. If we have clear and timely information available to us as to how and why we failed at something, it’s that much easier to keep going and approach a problem from a different angle. Appropriate feedback and a safe environment in which to explore solutions gives us the opportunity to keep trying at something until we get it right, rather than being paralyzed by poor estimates of their own ability or a task’s difficulty.
As it happens, that’s part of why I think my exploring the use of games, virtual environments and the like for education purposes could be useful. Done right, they’re a good mix of safe abstraction and authentic experience, with the ability to add information and guidance as appropriate. I like the idea of encouraging people to engage and actively learn, rather than just working to get through the assessments necessary to pass something.
Agreed – games and storytelling in general make for great learning experiences.
I needed to read this. Especially now. I let setbacks or perceived failures frustrate me and hold me back all the time. And as I stare down the throat of a huge challenge currently standing between me and what I want I need to keep this in mind.
Thanks.
I don’t know where it comes from, but this has pretty much always been my perspective… failures are hurdles to overcome, not walls to run into. I try to teach my children the same, but with only limited success; Cody has taken it to heart and is more unflappable than I in the face of repeated failures in almost any arena, Amber still tends to give at the first signs of failure. I think that it is as much personality and character as a learned behavior; however, I remain confident that it is something that CAN be learned, and that Amber WILL learn it.
I’ve heard it said by a few people (What the hell does that mean anyway? What do my sources have to hide?! TALK dam– … er.) that people who are particularly good at some things or are particularly intelligent come to accept that things happen easily, and so when they try something that is difficult, even if it is difficult for -everyone-, they give up easier.
I see what you mean – Amber seems the braver of the two, but Cody will keep plugging away. Must be an interesting dynamic between them when they’re working on things together.
It’s kind of fascinating that people react to different kinds of challenges in different ways.
Do you think Amber is more concerned with disappointing you, in general?
I very much enjoyed this article, and thinking on this. Thank you.
In some ways, I seem to be able to tackle some challenges and failures with a positive attitude, and with others, it is a struggle.
It seems that in business, and art, and creative endeavors, I go in with full steam and little fear. I have learned many lessons in failing with art, exploded lots of clay in kilns, made huge messes with paint, clay, paint, glue, and pretty much anything else I got my hands into, and have faced rejection in business and criticism in creativity. But I am generally unphased by these things, and take my hits, try to learn from them, and move on.
Its the “social failure” that is so much more of a challenge for me, especially right now, when I am undergoing such incredible change. Its a lot harder for me to deal with the social awkwardness and its hard to not feel ashamed that I have not learned a lot of the things I need to cope and interact with people.
But I am working on it, and reading things like this, and talking with amazing people (like you, Skennedy) have helped immensely. It seems like a wise idea to take the things I have learned in art and apply them to life, but that is sometimes easier said than done.
thank you. *big hugs*
I think that this article is timely for many of us. I’ve been too apt for too long to assume that if I fail at something it means that I didn’t deserve to try for it. This is one of the major things I need to work on. Training myself that not every unexpected stimulus is taunting me with how I’m subhuman wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Score one for psychology.
Well I am the textbook case of the intelligent person hitting the wall instead of the hurdle. When real failure finally caught up with me in college it was devastating and difficult to deal with. I was so use to things that I cared about coming easily to me that actually having to work at something was incredibly difficult. I sometimes wish I had been not as good at school so I could have learned how to deal with adversity earlier instead of having to bolt it into my personality and mindset so late in life.
It is only now that I am really learning to get up and try again. It can be quite difficult to see the obstacles as hurdles and not walls.
Thank you for sharing, this is definitely something I am working really hard to incorporate into my life. Failure happens only when you stop trying, everything else is a setback.
That’s a good reason why it’s pretty much necessary for gifted students to be given challenges and extension work early in their schooling. It’s not so much to make them move through their education faster, but to introduce them to the idea that there are difficult things out there that you can’t just immediately “get”, and have to work at.
I’ve seen a lot of quite intelligent people drop out of school or university and fall by the wayside because they’d sailed through earlier years without much trouble, and didn’t have the necessary skills or mindset to start climbing when the slope got steeper. I was nearly one of them.
Yes, I squeaked through graduate school by the skin of my teeth. It would have been a wonderful skill to have been introduced to in my earlier years.