Do we learn from our mistakes?

At work, as in life, we may sometimes feel that we are not esteemed as much as we deserve. The desire to be esteemed affects our self-esteem, but also our sense of belonging and of security. These themes sit at different levels of Maslow’s pyramid, which is a simplification of the hierarchy of human needs. The original formulation is in Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation” (Psychological Review, 1943), where the basic needs are described as arranged in a hierarchy of prepotency. We are therefore very sensitive to the judgment of others, especially that of the people with whom we share important parts of our lives (such as work).

Seeing how much influence it can have on us, we should be able to understand that appreciation is a far more effective stimulus than blame in dealing with colleagues and staff, even when their behavior is wrong.

To this “mechanical” approach we must add our psychological reaction to these stimuli. Our brain has numerous techniques at its disposal for reducing the impact of negative stimuli (defense mechanisms), so it is easy to see that to obtain more effective and lasting results from people we must rely above all (though not only) on positive stimuli.

Learning from mistakes has proved to be an inefficient system in business too: entrepreneurs who succeeded in the past are more likely to repeat their success than those who failed (Gompers, Kovner, Lerner and Scharfstein, “Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship,” 2010). The same holds in the laboratory: in a series of experiments, participants learned less from feedback on a wrong answer than from feedback on a right one (Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach, Psychological Science, 2019).

Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya of the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, studies what distinguishes those who learn easily from their mistakes from those who find it harder: “We are always told how important it is to learn from our errors, our experiences, but is this true? If so, then why do we all not learn from our experiences in the same way? It seems some people rarely do, even when they were informed of their errors in repeated attempts.” Professor Bhattacharya hypothesizes that the brain is more “active” in people who learn more easily from their mistakes.

Donna Alvermann, a researcher at the University of Georgia, holds that students ignore correct information when it conflicts with what they already believe: on tests of free recall and recognition, students hold on to their prior knowledge, however mistaken, and disregard new, correct information. The reasons lie not only in the difficulty of unlearning, but also in our brain’s resistance to acknowledging mistakes. We must therefore be aware that we protect our experiences, habits and knowledge even when we learn that more efficient paths exist.

To simplify: taking different opinions into consideration is tiring, accepting that we were wrong is tiring, unlearning is tiring. On top of this, we are always trying to keep our past actions and our present convictions as consistent as possible.

Earl K. Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, and his colleagues Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy created for the first time a unique snapshot of the learning process that shows how single cells change their responses in real time as a result of information about what is the right action and what is the wrong one.

“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain, nor was there any improvement in behavior.

After a correct response, the electrical impulses coming from neurons in each of the brain areas were more robust and conveyed more information. “The signal-to-noise ratio improved in both brain regions,” Miller said. “The heightened response led to them being more likely to get the next trial correct, too. This explains on a neural level why we seem to learn more from our successes than our failures.” The study, conducted on primates, is Histed, Pasupathy and Miller, “Learning substrates in the primate prefrontal cortex and striatum” (Neuron, 2009).

As in many other areas of professional life, organizations often ignore the mechanisms that govern our behavior and design inefficient processes for managing people. Each of us, however, can do a great deal to improve our own reaction and keep our brain “active,” by agreeing to process negative stimuli more carefully even though this is not very pleasant.

(Alberto Viotto)