Reply to “A Tendency to Answer Consistently Can Generate Apparent Failures to Learn From Failure”

Abstract

In Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach (2019), failure stymies learning: People learn less from failure than success. The commentary proposes that the failure to learn from failure could be due to a tendency to respond consistently. Although a consistent response pattern explains why people struggle to learn from failure in some paradigms, we argue that it does not explain the results of the original paradigm. Certain consistency mechanisms require that people assume they should be consistent with their initial intuition instead of updating as they learn new information. This assumption does not apply to the original paradigm. We discuss how the commentary helps sharpen the criteria for assessing learning from failure and the role of consistency as one potential barrier to learning.