Failure

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"Failing is not a crime but lack of effort is" - sign on Leh to Nubra road, Ladakh Failure is not a crime. Sign on Leh-Nubra road.2010.jpg
"Failing is not a crime but lack of effort is" – sign on Leh to Nubra road, Ladakh

Failure is the social concept of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and is usually viewed as the opposite of success. [1] The criteria for failure depends on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One person might consider a failure what another person considers a success, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a failure, another might consider to be a success, a qualified success or a neutral situation.

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It may also be difficult or impossible to ascertain whether a situation meets criteria for failure or success due to ambiguous or ill-defined definition of those criteria. Finding useful and effective criteria or heuristics to judge the success or failure of a situation may itself be a significant task.

Sociology

Cultural historian Scott Sandage argues that the concept of failure underwent a metamorphosis in the United States over the course of the 19th century. Initially, Sandage notes, financial failure, or bankruptcy, was understood as an event in a person's life: an occurrence, not a character trait. The notion of a person being a failure, Sandage argues, is a relative historical novelty: "[n]ot until the eve of the Civil War did Americans commonly label an insolvent man 'a failure'". [2] Accordingly, the notion of failure acquired both moralistic and individualistic connotations. By the late 19th century, to be a failure was to have a deficient character. [3]

In business

A commercial failure is a product or company that does not reach expectations of success.

Most of the items listed below had high expectations, significant financial investments, and/or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success. Due to the subjective nature of "success" and "meeting expectations", there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop".

Sometimes, commercial failures can receive a cult following, with the initial lack of commercial success even lending a cachet of subcultural coolness. [4] [5]

In marketing

Marketing researchers have distinguished between outcome and process failures. An outcome failure is a failure to obtain a good or service at all; a process failure is a failure to receive the good or service in an appropriate or preferable way. [6] Thus, a person who is only interested in the final outcome of an activity would consider it to be an outcome failure if the core issue has not been resolved or a core need is not met. A process failure occurs, by contrast, when, although the activity is completed successfully, the customer still perceives the way in which the activity is conducted to be below an expected standard or benchmark.

Wan and Chan note that outcome and process failures are associated with different kinds of detrimental effects to the consumer. They observe that "[a]n outcome failure involves a loss of economic resources (i.e., money, time) and a process failure involves a loss of social resources (i.e., social esteem)". [7]

In education

A failing grade is a mark or grade given to a student to indicate that they did not pass an assignment or a class. Grades may be given as numbers, letters or other symbols.

By the year 1884, Mount Holyoke College was evaluating students' performance on a 100-point or percentage scale and then summarizing those numerical grades by assigning letter grades to numerical ranges. Mount Holyoke assigned letter grades A through E, with E indicating lower than 75% performance and designating failure. The A–E system spread to Harvard University by 1890. In 1898, Mount Holyoke adjusted the grading system, adding an F grade for failing (and adjusting the ranges corresponding to the other letters). The practice of letter grades spread more broadly in the first decades of the 20th century. By the 1930s, the letter E was dropped from the system, for unclear reasons. [8]

In philosophy

Philosophers in the analytic tradition have suggested that failure is connected to the notion of an omission.[ citation needed ] In ethics, omissions are distinguished from acts: acts involve an agent doing something; omissions involve an agent's not doing something.

Both actions and omissions may be morally significant. The classic example of a morally significant omission is one's failure to rescue someone in dire need of assistance. It may seem that one is morally blameworthy for failing to rescue in such a case.

Patricia G. Smith notes that there are two ways one can not do something: consciously or unconsciously. [9] A conscious omission is intentional, whereas an unconscious omission may be negligent, but is not intentional. [10] Accordingly, Smith suggests, we ought to understand failure as involving a situation in which it is reasonable to expect a person to do something, but they do not do it—regardless of whether they intend to do it or not. [11]

Randolph Clarke, commenting on Smith's work, suggests that "[w]hat makes [a] failure to act an omission is the applicable norm". [12] In other words, a failure to act becomes morally significant when a norm demands that some action be taken, and it is not taken.

In science

Scientific hypotheses can be said to fail when they lead to predictions that do not match the results found in experiments. Alternatively, experiments can be regarded as failures when they do not provide helpful information about nature.[ citation needed ] However, the standards of what constitutes failure are not clear-cut. For example, the Michelson–Morley experiment became the "most famous failed experiment in history" because it did not detect the motion of the Earth through the luminiferous aether as had been expected. This failure to confirm the presence of the aether would later provide support for Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. [13]

Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly explains that a great deal can be learned from things going wrong unexpectedly, and that part of science's success comes from keeping blunders "small, manageable, constant, and trackable". He uses the example of engineers and programmers who push systems to their limits, breaking them to learn about them. Kelly also warns against creating a culture that punishes failure harshly, because this inhibits a creative process, and risks teaching people not to communicate important failures with others (e.g., null results). [14] Failure can also be used productively, for instance to find identify ambiguous cases that warrant further interpretation. [15] [16] When studying biases in machine learning, for instance, failure can be seen as a "cybernetic rupture where pre-existing biases and structural flaws make themselves known". [17]

Linguistics

The term "miserable failure" was popularized as a result of a widely known "Google bombing", which caused Google searches for the term to turn up the White House biography of George W. Bush. [18]

Internet memes and "fail"

During the early 2000s, the term fail began to be used as an interjection in the context of Internet memes. The interjection fail and the superlative form epic fail expressed derision and ridicule for mistakes deemed "eminently mockable". [19] According to linguist Ben Zimmer, the most probable origin of this usage is Blazing Star (1998), a Japanese video game whose game over message was translated into English as "You fail it". [19] [20] [21] The comedy website Fail Blog , launched in January 2008, featured photos and videos captioned with "fail" and its variations. [19] The #fail hashtag is used on the microblogging site Twitter to indicate contempt or displeasure, and the image that formerly accompanied the message that the site was overloaded is referred to as the "fail whale". [22]

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Decision-making</span> Cognitive process to choose a course of action or belief

In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business performance management</span> Processes to bring output into alignment with goals

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A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more credit for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their self-esteem from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem. For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade on an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher's poor teaching ability or unfair test questions might be exhibiting a self-serving bias. Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace, interpersonal relationships, sports, and consumer decisions.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Regret</span> Negative conscious and emotional reaction to personal past acts and behaviours

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The omissions of individuals are generally not criminalised in English criminal law, save in many instances of a taking on of a duty of care, having contractual responsibility or clearly negligent creation of a hazard. Many comparator jurisdictions put a general statutory duty on strangers to rescue – this is not so in English law. Defenders and reasoners of the position regard it as wrong for the criminal law to punish people in many circumstances for committing no physical act, which it is argued would be an infringement on human autonomy. Academics arguing for reform argue that a social responsibility to assist others should exist, particularly where there would be no danger to the rescuer.

Goal orientation, or achievement orientation, is an "individual disposition towards developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". In general, an individual can be said to be mastery or performance oriented, based on whether one's goal is to develop one's ability or to demonstrate one's ability, respectively. A mastery orientation is also sometimes referred to as a learning orientation.

In sociology and gender studies, "doing gender" is the idea that gender, rather than being an innate quality of individuals, is a social construct that actively surfaces in everyday human interaction. This term was used by Candace West and Don Zimmerman in their article "Doing Gender", published in 1987 in Gender and Society. According to this paper, an individual's performance of gender is intended to construct gendered behavior as naturally occurring. This façade furthers a system through which individuals are judged in terms of their failure or success to meet gendered societal expectations, called the accountability structure. The concept of doing gender was later expanded in the book Doing Gender, Doing Difference, edited by Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West.

Paternalistic deception is a type of deception that is ostensibly performed for the deceived individual's good by a person assuming a paternalistic role, whether they are their actual parent or not. The most used form of paternalistic deception are paternalist lies. They are told by an individual, a group, or an institution with the intent of benefitting the target lied to by sparing their feelings or preventing them from experiencing psychological harm. As they are justified by the assumption that they are in the target's best interest, they are a subset of prosocial lies. They can occur through omissions, half-truths, or white lies. Paternalistic lies can be manipulative, however their key feature involves the interference with the target's autonomy. This is induced by denying them access to accurate information and by limiting their behaviour choices. Confrontations with paternalistic lies can begin in early childhood and continue throughout an individual's life.

Automation bias is the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct. Automation bias stems from the social psychology literature that found a bias in human-human interaction that showed that people assign more positive evaluations to decisions made by humans than to a neutral object. The same type of positivity bias has been found for human-automation interaction, where the automated decisions are rated more positively than neutral. This has become a growing problem for decision making as intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits have increasingly integrated computerized system monitors and decision aids to mostly factor out possible human error. Errors of automation bias tend to occur when decision-making is dependent on computers or other automated aids and the human is in an observatory role but able to make decisions. Examples of automation bias range from urgent matters like flying a plane on automatic pilot to such mundane matters as the use of spell-checking programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Success</span> Meeting or surpassing an intended goal or objective

Success is the state or condition of meeting a defined range of expectations. It may be viewed as the opposite of failure. The criteria for success depend on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One person might consider a success what another person considers a failure, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a success, another might consider to be a failure, a qualified success or a neutral situation. For example, a film that is a commercial failure or even a box-office bomb can go on to receive a cult following, with the initial lack of commercial success even lending a cachet of subcultural coolness.

References

  1. ↑ "Failure - Definition of failure by Merriam-Webster". merriam-webster.com. Archived from the original on 16 July 2015.
  2. ↑ Sandage 2006, p. 12.
  3. ↑ Sandage 2006, p. 17: This 'American sense' looked upon failure as 'a moral sieve' that trapped the loafer and passed the true man through. Such ideologies fixed blame squarely on individual faults, not extenuating circumstances …
  4. ↑ Hunter, I. Q. (8 September 2016). Cult Film as a Guide to Life: Fandom, Adaptation, and Identity. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN   978-1-62356-897-9.
  5. ↑ Mathijs, Ernest; Sexton, Jamie (22 November 2019). The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-317-36223-4.
  6. ↑ Smith, Amy K.; Bolton, Ruth N.; Wagner, Janet (August 1999). "A Model of Customer Satisfaction with Service Encounters Involving Failure and Recovery". Journal of Marketing Research . 36 (3): 356–372 at 358. doi:10.1177/002224379903600305. ISSN   0022-2437. S2CID   220628355.
  7. ↑ Wan, Lisa; Chan, Elisa (20 March 2019). "Failure is Not Fatal: Actionable Insights on Service Failure and Recovery for the Hospitality Industry". Boston Hospitality Review. 7 (1). ISSN   2326-0351.
  8. ↑ Schinske, Jeffrey; Tanner, Kimberly (2014). "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)". CBE: Life Sciences Education. 13 (2): 159–166. doi:10.1187/cbe.CBE-14-03-0054. ISSN   1931-7913. PMC   4041495 . PMID   26086649.
  9. ↑ Smith 1990, p. 159.
  10. ↑ Smith 1990, p. 160.
  11. ↑ Smith 1990, p. 162–163.
  12. ↑ Clarke, Randolph (2 June 2014). Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 32. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199347520.001.0001. ISBN   978-0-19-934752-0.
  13. ↑ Blum, Edward K.; Lototsky, Sergey V. (2006). Mathematics of Physics and Engineering. World Scientific. ISBN   978-981-256-621-8.
  14. ↑ "THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 6". Edge.org. Archived from the original on 5 December 2013. Retrieved 24 June 2014.
  15. ↑ Rettberg, Jill Walker (2022). "Algorithmic failure as a humanities methodology: Machine learning's mispredictions identify rich cases for qualitative analysis". Big Data & Society. 9 (2): 205395172211312. doi: 10.1177/20539517221131290 . hdl: 11250/3035859 . ISSN   2053-9517. S2CID   253026358.
  16. ↑ Munk, Anders Kristian; Olesen, Asger Gehrt; Jacomy, Mathieu (2022). "The Thick Machine: Anthropological AI between explanation and explication" (PDF). Big Data & Society. 9 (1): 205395172110698. doi: 10.1177/20539517211069891 . ISSN   2053-9517. S2CID   250180452.
  17. ↑ Bridges, Lauren E (2021). "Digital failure: Unbecoming the "good" data subject through entropic, fugitive, and queer data". Big Data & Society. 8 (1): 205395172097788. doi: 10.1177/2053951720977882 . ISSN   2053-9517. S2CID   233890960.
  18. ↑ Mikkelson, Barbara; Mikkelson, David P. (13 August 2007). "Someone Set Us Up The Google Bomb". Snopes.com . Retrieved 9 August 2009.
  19. 1 2 3 Zimmer, Ben (7 August 2009). "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection". The New York Times . Archived from the original on 27 April 2017. Retrieved 9 August 2009.
  20. ↑ Schofield, Jack (17 October 2008). "All your FAIL are belong to us". The Guardian . Archived from the original on 4 December 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2009.
  21. ↑ Beam, Christopher (15 October 2008). "Epic Win". Slate . Archived from the original on 25 August 2009. Retrieved 21 August 2009.
  22. ↑ Malik, Asmaa (24 April 2010). "Joy in the failure of others has gone competitive". Montreal Gazette. Retrieved 21 May 2010.[ dead link ]

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