Reluctance to share
Previous research had already exposed our unhelpful aversion to information about ongoing or future failure – a problem dubbed ‘the ostrich effect’ by University of Sheffield psychologist Thomas Webb and his colleagues.
Whether we’re trying a new fitness regime, building a company website or planning for a looming pandemic, the human inclination is to put our heads in the sand once we’ve embarked on our path. Rather than monitoring our progress to check if we’ve gone off track, we grit our teeth, continue and hope for the best.
We also tend to neglect imagining what might go wrong when we look ahead toward attaining a goal, as research by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen at New York University and the University of Hamburg has shown. Yet when people are prompted to engage in ‘mental contrasting’ – anticipating the obstacles along the way to attaining their goal – they are more likely to persevere and succeed in their aims.
I’m fascinated by a growing trend of companies holding ‘screw-up nights’ – the actual name is a bit more colourful – Ayelet Fishbach
Now Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach have added to this literature by focusing on our reluctance to pay attention to failures – both our own and others – after they’ve happened. In their recent paper, the researchers asked dozens of teachers to recall a specific time they’d been successful at work and a specific time that they’d failed. When they asked the teachers which story they’d choose to share to help other teachers, nearly 70% opted to share their success rather than their failure.
The same thing happened when they asked hundreds of online volunteers to think of times they’d succeeded at staying focused at work, and then of times they’d failed and become distracted. The majority were more reluctant to share their focusing failures than successes. The aversion to sharing failures remained true even when the researchers asked the volunteers to share with their ‘future selves’, suggesting there is more to this bias than wanting to make a good impression on strangers.
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