Tim Harford describes "chasing losses" and other cognitive processes that impede learning from mistakes

There's a terrific excerpt from Tim Harford's book "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure" on the Co.Design blog. Harford discusses several traps in learning from mistakes, and uses choreographer Twyla Tharp's experience with her show "Movin' Out" as a frame to discuss how these traps work, and how Tharp avoided them. An excerpt of the excerpt:

The first of those quirks leads to denial. It’s why Sir James Crosby sacked Paul Moore rather than accept his valid critique of the bank, why Joseph Stalin ordered Peter Palchinsky to be killed for his correct analysis of the great Soviet engineering projects, and why Donald Rumsfeld forbade his senior general to use the accurate word “insurgency.” It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to admit that we have made a mistake and to try to put it right....

The second trap our minds set for us is that we chase our losses in an attempt to make them go away. [Editor's note. Anyone who has gambled in a casino knows of this pitfall.] Recall Frank, the luckless contestant on Deal or no Deal: having discarded the box containing half a million euros, he proceeded to reject ever more reasonable offers from the Banker until he ended up with next to nothing. All because, to quote the psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, he had not “made peace with his losses.”...

The final danger Tharp avoided is one we might call “hedonic editing,” borrowing a term coined by Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist behind the book Nudge. While denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge a mistake, and loss-chasing is the process of causing more damage while trying to hastily erase the mistake, hedonic editing is a subtler process of convincing ourselves that the mistake doesn’t matter.

Related posts:
Tim Harford challenges us to "make good mistakes."
Twyla Tharp on the usefulness of failure

Choreographer Twyla Tharp on the usefulness of failure

In the April 2008 Harvard Business Review, editor Diane Coutu interviews choreographer Twyla Tharp, creator of avant-garde dances as well as the Broadway show "Movin' Out." Tharp mentions some important thoughts on failure.

If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion. True failure is a mark of accomplishment in the sense that something new & different was tried. Ideally, the best way to fail is in private.... I have also sometimes failed in public, and that's very painful. But failing, even in this way, is not useless. It can force you to get yourself together and to produce something new.