So telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we’re aiming for when we put positive labels - “gifted,” “talented,” “brilliant” - on people. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.

The study revealed that mistakes themselves are neither good nor bad. Their impact hinges on the broader context. When incompetent people made mistakes, it just reinforced other’s already negative impressions. It was more of the same.

When competent people made mistakes, though, it had the opposite effect. Successful people are hard to identify with. They seem so perfect that it’s hard to connect. And that’s why mistakes can help. Because when otherwise competent people make a mistake once in a while, it humanizes them. It makes them more real, which makes them more likable.

As long as someone is already perceived as competent, acknowledging mistakes can be beneficial.

For another set of students, the researchers worded the praise slightly differently. Rather than praising the person, or telling them how smart they were, the researchers praised the process, or how hard they were working (“You must have worked hard at these problems”).

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach conducted five studies to test the hypothesis that failure, rather than promoting learning, actually undermines it. In one study they asked participants a series of questions starting with identifying which of two symbols from a fictional ancient script represented an animal. Afterward, one group of study participants was told, “You are correct” (success feedback). The other group was told, “You are incorrect” (failure feedback). To see how well they learned from each type of feedback, participants were given a follow-up test. This time they were asked to look at the exact same symbols and asked to identify which one represented a nonliving entity. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Yet those who had been told they were correct in the first round scored higher in their second test than those told their answers were incorrect. Over and over, people learned less from being given information about what they got wrong than about what they got right.