In the last talk of our Research Seminar Series before Christmas, Prof. Fishbach from University of Chicago (US) presented her research on sharing information learned from failure.

Although we are living in a society that celebrates failure as a teachable moment, research by Prof. Fishbach suggests that failure can undermine learning.

In several studies, Prof. Fishbach shows that although failure contains useful information, people learn less from failure feedback than from success feedback and moreover, do not share information obtained from failures. Participants in her experiments consistently undershared failure, even though failure contained objectively more information compared to success. Her studies further show that people are less likely to share information they learned from failure feedback even compared to a no-feedback experience, which offers no useful information at all. Thus, participants chose to share information on an answer on which they received no feedback over an answer on which they received the information that their given answer was wrong.

The Marketing department at WU thanks Prof. Fishbach for her time and for sharing her valuable knowledge.

Barbara Hartl