Why It’s So Hard to Learn From Our Mistakes
Here’s how to stop your ego from getting in the way
You’re in the shower, lying in bed, or huffing along on the treadmill, and suddenly, like someone just snapped their fingers, you’re overcome with embarrassment. For reasons beyond your understanding, your brain has decided it’s time to relive your most egregious botch-job, dumbest blunder, or most humiliating gaffe.
Our failures stick with us. In theory, that can be a good thing, unpleasant as it sometimes feels, because remembering helps us avoid repeating our past missteps. But that only works if we actually improve post-failure.
A new study from the University of Chicago found that we often don’t learn from our mistakes at all. In fact, mistakes can actually undermine learning: Over the course of five different experiments, when participants were told they got something wrong, they shut down and did worse on subsequent tasks.
According to Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Decision Research and the study’s co-author, that willful blindness is an act of self-preservation. “Often, people find failure ego-threatening, and they tune out,” she says. “As a result, they stop learning.”
