The (bounded) benefits of correction: The unanticipated interpersonal advantages of making and correcting mistakes

Individuals and organizations often fear that making a mistake in their pursuit of a goal will lead others to judge them as less likely to achieve that goal. We find that the reverse regularly occurs under systematic conditions. In six studies, we examine how observers perceive both organizations and individuals who make a mistake and correct it, versus those who actively prevent that same mistake from occurring in the first place. We find that observers infer that others who make—and correct—a mistake while pursuing a goal are more likely to achieve that goal than others who successfully prevent that same mistake from occurring. We further find that observers make this inference because, although observers construe prevention to mean that a goal pursuer has been consistently vigilant, they believe mistake correction requires more effort than prevention (even when it does not). Moreover, the effort signaled by correction is perceived as more diagnostic of goal commitment than the vigilance signaled by prevention. Consequently, observers judge both individuals and organizations that make and then correct a mistake to be more likely to achieve the goal imperiled by the mistake than an otherwise identical entity that actively prevented the same mistake from occurring in the first place. We further find that these benefits of mistake correction occur only when a mistake is attributed to an unstable cause. As a result, these benefits of mistake correction do not emerge in all contexts—for example, observers attribute a mistake to a stable cause when it is repeated or has very large consequences, and this stable attribution prevents the benefits of correction from emerging.