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🚇 Mind the Failure Gap New research reveals that we systematically underestimate how often people fail, and this shapes our beliefs, politics, and relationships Failure is more common than we realize. Each day, we might pick up someone else’s order at the coffee shop, say the wrong thing at a dinner party, or leave embarrassing typos in our newsletters. It was Benjamin Franklin who claimed that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Well, I’d like to add a third depressing guarantee: failure is certain too. Bizarrely, despite the ubiquity of failure around us, we can’t help but judge both ourselves and others a little too severely when failures happen. When we burn the meal we’re cooking, our stress levels hit the ceiling. When someone mistakenly cuts us off in traffic, we hurl expletives at our windows. When our partner forgets to pick up the one thing we requested from the grocery store, we momentarily consider whether to search online for “best divorce lawyers in my area”. A new set of studies suggests much of this harshness and misunderstanding may be driven by a blind spot in our failure detection systems. People are systematically unaware of the true prevalence of failures around them, and this misperception can impact how we treat others at every level of society. 🧪 What did the researchers do? In a 2026 study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers tested people’s intuitions about the prevalence of failure. First, they recruited hundreds of online participants and asked them to estimate people’s general rate of failure across more than 30 domains of everyday life. This included the percentage of crimes for which police fail to identify a suspect, the percentage of new businesses that fail, the percentage of new drugs that never receive FDA approval, and the percentage of romantic relationships that end in breakups. The researchers then compared participants’ estimates to verified official statistics and national records. They also analyzed news articles, social media posts, and online consumer reviews, searching for evidence of how often people actually discuss failure in the real world outside the lab. Finally, they also tested whether simply telling people the true rate of various failures in the world would meaningfully change their attitudes and behaviors. For this, participants were tested within their real-life roles: educators at a professional conference, hiring managers, and citizens weighing in on policy questions such as mass incarceration. 🔍 What did the research find? People consistently underestimated the rate at which people fail. On average, failures occurred around 61% of the time across the life domains studied, yet people estimated the failure rate to be only around 41%. In many cases, this was not a subtle gap. For example, people thought TSA screening missed about 14% of weapons at airport security when the true rate is closer to 70%. They also estimated that roughly 35% of US college students fail to graduate on time when the true figure is closer to 64%. They even believed that only 25% of wildlife on Earth had gone extinct since 1970 when the actual figure is around 70% (I guess you could think of this as either a failure of wildlife survival or a failure of human conservation). The researchers refer to this underestimation effect as “the failure gap”. They attribute this gap at least partly to under-reporting of failure in the information we share with each other, including in the news and social media. People are resistant to publicly discussing failure—perhaps because it threatens their self-esteem—so their perceptions of failure across society as a whole become misaligned with reality. Even online product reviews showed this kind of pattern: common medications like Tylenol fail to provide meaningful relief for around half of users, yet fewer than 4% of reviews on major retail platforms rate the product below four stars. People even hesitate to admit that a drug might not work for them. So what happens when people are more willing to discuss failures? The #MeToo movement normalized the sharing of experiences of sexual misconduct. Sexual harassment and abuse went from failures that were swept under the rug to failures that were all over mainstream news and household conversations, so the researchers tested whether people’s estimates of sexual misconduct would be more accurate in this specific case. Consistent with their predictions, the failure gap not only disappeared from people’s estimates on this topic, it reversed entirely: people overestimated the likelihood of sexual misconduct in the general population. The same participants simultaneously underestimated women’s health failures like heart disease and cancer diagnoses, showing that two very negative topics can produce opposing perceptions based on how widely they are discussed. The researchers finally tested whether closing the failure gap on certain issues would c