Thinking negatively about failure leads to less attempts to try to overcome obstacles
Summary
- We are disproportionately affected by negative consequences, even if they are arbirary, that make us afraid of failure.
Details
- A study done in 2016 by Mike Rober involved 50,000 people attempting to learn how to code.
- Half were told when an error was made 'You have failed. Please try again.' THe other half were told 'You have failed. You've lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.'
- The half that were given a neutral message on average tried 12 times and had a success rate of 68%, and the half that had a negative message only made 5 attempts and had a success rate of 52%
- If we think positively about failure, we are less likely to give up and more likely to succeed at what we are attempting.
References
Quotes
In 2016, a NASA-trained engineer named Mark Rober recruited 50,000 people to try out a new computer challenge. He wanted to prove that anyone could learn how to code, he told them. And so he set them off on a series of relatively easy coding challenges. In fact, the experiment was more complicated than Rober let on.
The key difference came when the participants made an error. Half of them (group 1) received an error message when they wrote code that failed to execute properly: ‘You have failed. Please try again.’ The other half (group 2) got a slightly different message: ‘You have failed. You’ve lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.’ Everything else about the two groups was identical. This small distinction made an astonishing difference. Group 1,
on average, made twelve attempts to solve the coding puzzle, and had a success rate of 68 per cent. Group 2, on average, made just five attempts to solve the puzzle, with a success rate of 52 per cent. The first time I heard about this experiment I was astonished.
Purely because there was an arbitrary, meaningless ‘penalty’ of five points for failure at the puzzle, the 25,000 people in group 2 (from all around the world) made, on average, less than half the number of attempts at the puzzle than those in group 1. As you might have guessed, Rober’s interest wasn’t really in teaching people to code. He was most interested in how we think about failure. His aim was to show that we’re hugely, disproportionately impacted by negative consequences – even arbitrary ones. And these consequences make us afraid of failure, even when we needn’t be.
Related
- Failure is a positive sign that you are trying to stretch and do something beyond your current abilities
- The only failure is to avoid creating in the first place
- Benefit from failure
- How to fail at almost everything and still win big - Scott Adams
- The only failure is to avoid creating in the first place
- Ive failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed - Michael Jordan.
- Questions to confront fear of failure
- When in doubt, try it out