"I've failed too": Research explains psychology of helping others feel better about personal disappointments

Personal and professional conversations about triumph and disappointment happen every day, but what is the most appropriate way to react when others share their news with us?

New research by Bayes Business School (City St George’s, University of London) reveals the popular reaction is to mirror success with our own successes, and failure with our failures. Across nine experiments with more than 8,000 participants, deeper analysis suggests this reflects attempts to show empathy while reducing a sense of boastfulness.

Highlights from the research, co-authored by Irene Scopelliti, Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at Bayes, along with colleagues from Rice University (USA), Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and Bocconi University (Italy), show:

• When responding to others’ tales of success and failure, we prefer to match our own experiences to theirs. Matching a failure shows empathy to someone who has not succeeded, while matching success avoids the appearance of boastfulness.
• We prefer to match failures than successes. This is because empathy for others is seen as more beneficial to conversation than self-congratulation or perceived one-upmanship.
• When disclosing non-matching outcomes, responders alter tone or avoid disclosure altogether. People who have succeeded where someone else has failed tend to reply apologetically, downplay their success, or avoid sharing entirely. If sharing failure in response to success, they tend to delay disclosure so as not to deflate the other person’s good news.
• Personal relationships and directly comparable experiences increase matching tendencies. People disclose matching experiences, particularly failures, more when they care about the other person involved, and when their experiences took place in the same context such as failed driving tests or health checks.

In a mix of hypothetical and real scenarios, researchers recorded participant responses and reasoning across different contexts, with varying degrees of relationship closeness.

Participants were pre-assigned either a success or failure outcome of their own and asked to choose whether or not to respond when hearing about another person’s outcome.

Further studies added factors into decision-making, such as outcome time, whether it was work or health-related, degrees of liking for others, relationship closeness and status differences between the two parties. Participants were also asked to reflect on their own reasons for disclosure.

Taken together, the research suggests that our decisions to disclose experiences when responding to others are driven less by the desire to impress and signal status, and more by concern for how the other person feels.

Professor Scopelliti said:

“It is easy to believe we share successes to impress and hide failures out of shame, but this assumes disclosure is a one-way street. This research shows that it is in fact deeply responsive, and that hearing someone else’s outcome changes what we are willing to reveal about our own.

“When someone tells you they have struggled, you reach for your own struggles not to compete, but to comfort. When you have done well where they have not, you would often rather say nothing than risk making them feel worse.

“Additionally, when people do choose to share good news after someone else has failed, they do not simply announce it. Instead, they lead with consolation, apologise for their good fortune or hold back the news until later in the conversation. This shows that both whether and how we disclose is influenced by concern for the other person.

“What we share is not just a reflection of who we are or how we want to be seen, it is a direct response to what the person in front of us has just disclosed. We are not managing our own image so much as trying to protect how the other person feels.”

‘Responses to Outcome Disclosure: People Asymmetrically Disclose or Hide Their Outcomes to Protect Others’ Emotions’ by Emily Prinsloo, Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau is published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.