It Matters That Failures Are Underreported
We talk less about failure than success. That has an impact on our thinking.
Posted March 19, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
There is an interesting paradox related to failure. On the one hand, we believe that failures are potentially good learning experiences ( though that may not always be the case ). We can learn from our own mistakes as well as those of others. Industries like aviation and medicine that systematically catalog and review failures are ones that continuously improve.
On the other hand, we rarely hear about many of the failures that go on around us daily. The local newspaper publishes reviews of thriving local restaurants, but does not report when some of those establishments go out of business later in the year. We read stories about lottery winners, but not the millions of people who buy lottery tickets and win nothing. Even in sports, coverage focuses more on the top athletes and teams than on those that struggle.
An interesting paper by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Kaitlin Woolley, Minhee Kim, and Eliana Polimeni published in 2026 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explores the tendency to focus on successes rather than failures matters.
The authors verified that failures are underreported by searching media databases for reports about a variety of kinds of failures for which the real percentage is known compared to reporting on successes. Using many different techniques to search, the authors found that successes are reported on far more often than failures compared to the actual rate of success and failure in these domains.
One consequence of failures being underreported is that people underestimate the frequency of all kinds of failures. The authors showed participants a variety of events for which the true rate of success and failure is known. These ranged from individual events, like the percentage of romantic relationships that fail or the percentage of online purchases that are returned, to national level events, like the percentage of new businesses that close or the number of patents applications that are rejected, to worldwide to international events, like the percentage of underwater species that have gone extinct since 1970 or the percentage of people worldwide who have a working toilet in their homes. The questions also spanned many different domains. Some questions asked about the percentage of successes rather than failures to ensure that the results don’t just reflect a tendency to give high or low percentages as answer to questions in general.
In all of the domains tested, people estimated the likelihood of a failure as lower than it actually is. In some domains, this difference was substantial. For example, people greatly underestimated the number of weapons that airport security fails to detect as well as the percentage of times that Advil fails to relieve a person’s symptoms.
Is this tendency to underestimate the chances of failure really due to underreporting of failure?
In other studies, the authors exposed people to headlines of news stories where the collection of stories either appeared at the rate at which they are normally reported (which is biased toward success) or at a rate that reflects the actual rate of failure. Then they judged the actual failure rate. People exposed to stories with a ratio similar to the actual rate of failure were more accurate at judging failure in these domains than people exposed to stories that overrepresented success. This finding suggests that when people are exposed to stories of failure, that influences their judgments about likely success.
But does this matter?
The authors suggest that a lack of understanding of real failure rates may lead people to punish failure more harshly than they would if they knew the true rate of failure. In one set of studies, educators were asked whether students who committed an infraction at school like hitting or cyberbullying should be suspended. About 41% of educators thought these students should be suspended for an infraction. When told that over 3 million students nationally commit infractions, only about 20% of educators thought students should be suspended for infractions. A similar finding was obtained in a study in which managers of companies were asked about hiring candidates struggling with mental health.
Finally, the authors did two studies demonstrating that people are more willing to support policies that help others when they know the true rate of failure in a relevant domain. For example, corporate managers were more likely to support paid parental leave for new mothers when exposed to the actual rate at which new mothers experience health problems after giving birth than they were without that knowledge.
This collection of studies suggests that there would be a number of benefits to giving people better information about how often failures are experienced. Not only would people make better estimates of rates of failure, but they would be more likely to support people who have experienced a failure and less likely to punish those failures. Such a supportive attitude toward failure might help us as a society learn more from things that go wrong and better focus people on the power of recovering from failures.
Eskreis-Winkler, L., Woolley, K., Kim, M., & Polimeni, E. (2026). The failure gap. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 130 (3), 485–507. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000468
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Art Markman, Ph.D. , is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.