If you fail a test, is it really highly likely that you can pass it the next time? In this paper, Eskreis-Winkler and colleagues (2024) explored individuals’ overestimation of the ability of others to succeed after initial failure in a series of seven studies. In this post, we will discuss three of these studies: Study 3 (Do individuals overestimate how likely others are to succeed after failure?), Study 5 (Why do individuals overestimate others’ ability to succeed after failure?), and Study 6 (What is a helpful intervention to correct the overestimation?).
In Study 3, researchers recruited oncology nurses attending a virtual conference. Nurses were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: experiencers or predictors. Experiencers answered a short multiple choice question about a topic relevant to nurses. For example: “What percent of Americans believe that racism can impact the care they receive in the U.S. health system?” Only nurses who answered their question incorrectly were retained for the remainder of the study. Nurses who answered the question wrong were then given a brief period of time to reflect before being asked a follow up question that was very similar to the initial question they received. For example, “Which is NOT the percent of Americans who believe that racism can impact the care they receive in the U.S. health system?” Nurses in the predictor group were then asked whether or not other nurses correctly answered the follow up question (“Imagine one of your peers guessed an answer to the question above and got it wrong. Do you think they’d be able to learn from that feedback and answer the question below correctly?”). The results of the study showed that predictor nurses overestimated how often their colleagues were able to correctly answer a question after initial failure.
The researchers then conducted Study 5 to focus on the mechanism underlying the overestimation. They again assigned participants to two conditions: experiencer and predictor. The primary difference of this study from Study 3 is that experiencers decided whether or not they wanted an explanation for the correct answer in the first round. Predictors were then asked “For how many of the Round 1 questions do you think the participant chose to see explanatory feedback before moving on to the bonus round, Round 2?” before being asked to predict whether or not participants answered the follow up correctly. It was found that predictors overestimated how often individuals actually request feedback in order to learn from their failure. This suggests that the overestimation of the rate of success following failure is a result of a tendency to overestimate how often people take action to correct failure.
In Study 6, an intervention is used to correct the tendency to overestimate others’ ability to succeed after failure. In this study, participants were assigned to two conditions: corrected failure beliefs and control conditions. In the control, participants answered “Take a guess: What percent of people who have had heart attacks find the motivation to implement a healthy lifestyle change (e.g., changing their diet, quitting smoking, getting more exercise) following the heart attack?” from 0 to 100%. In the corrected failure beliefs condition, participants received information beforehand about the number of heart attack patients that actually spend time contemplating their health issues. Results showed that people are less likely to overestimate when they know about the actual percentage of patients who actively think about their health..
When viewed in conjunction, these studies suggest that individuals tend to overestimate others’ ability to achieve success after failure because they overestimate how much others attend to failure.
Educators may consider using these findings to provide more support to students who have failed exams. This could include offering tutorials before retests or requiring students to correct their previous attempt before retesting.
EPIC may use these findings as an opportunity to conduct further research which addresses areas of vagueness in this paper. For instance, future research can investigate whether the success overestimation observed in this study would generalize to other cultures.
If you are interested in learning more about this study, please retrieve the article from here: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-xge0001610.pdf
This post is written by Akhil Kotha.
Reference:
Eskreis-Winkler, L., Woolley, K., Erensoy, E., & Kim, M. (2024). The exaggerated benefits of failure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(7), 1920.
