The Cultural Meaning of Failure
We encounter failure in our daily lives. Failures can be as trivial as spilling a coffee or missing an appointment, and as consequential as failing a job interview or losing a major competition.
How we interpret the meaning of failure and, in turn, how we remember our failure and how we react to it, can be influenced by many factors, including our cultural upbringing.
Culture, Self, and the Meaning of Failure
Failure can mean different things to different people in different cultures. This has largely to do with the importance people attribute to feeling good about themselves.
In North American culture, for instance, the pursuit of happiness is regarded as a central goal of life. People are encouraged to strive for and maintain a positive sense of self, which is considered not only a desirable personal attribute but also an indicator of psychological well-being.
In this cultural context, failure is often viewed as a threat to one’s positive sense of self and, therefore, needs to be avoided as well as forgotten when experienced.
In comparison, in East Asian cultures, the emphasis is more on self-improvement than feeling good about oneself. Life is viewed as comprising both ups and downs, and having failures and setbacks is only a natural part of living.
Rather than compromising one’s positive self-views, failure is idealized as an opportunity for people to learn from their past mistakes and to seek improvement in the self.
Remembering Failure in the Cultural Context
The different cultural meanings of failure can influence how people perceive and remember their past failures (versus success). For example, research has observed that after performing a task such as solving anagrams or shooting a basketball, European Americans remember having performed better than they actually did, whereas Asians remember having performed about as well as they actually did.
Interestingly, European Americans tend to choose the same task again after remembering their previous high performance—thus to seek out success and avoid failure, whereas memories of failure and success have no bearing on Asians’ subsequent task choices.
Similarly, when asked to recall personal success and failure events, Americans remember significantly more successes than failures, whereas Japanese recall similar numbers of success and failure memories. When recalling and evaluating the most important success and failure events in their lives, Americans view the successful event as more enhancing for their self-esteem and the failure event as less tolerable, more problematic for their goals, and more damaging to their self-esteem, when compared with Chinese participants.
North Americans also report their past failures as feeling further away in time and more difficult to remember than similarly distant success events, whereas Japanese participants find personal failure and success events similar in subjective distance and memorability.
In a recent study, we asked European American and Asian participants to recall as many success and failure memories as they could from their lives. We found that European Americans recalled a greater number of success than failure memories, whereas Asians recalled success and failure memories about evenly.
Furthermore, whereas European Americans who recalled more success and fewer failure memories had more positive self-views, the recall of success and failure memories was unrelated to the sense of self among Asians.
Conclusion
Taken together, the meaning of failure is derived from cultural beliefs and priorities with regard to our life experiences and sense of self. This can, in turn, influence how we remember our past failures and how such memories are implicated in our self-views.
Developing a cultural narrative that prescribes failure as a natural part of life—not necessarily reflecting poorly on the self—may encourage healthy attitudes towards failure and perseverance.