The bumps and bruises from turning a blind eye: Learning from our failures and surprises

When academic researchers and innovators ignore undesirable information and turn a blind eye to failures and unexpected outcomes, the results are generally detrimental.Knowledge is rarely developed with ease. Much more often, researchers and innovators toil arduously to devise new experiments, to test hypotheses, to develop new interventions, and to consider new interpretations of complex data. Again and again, scholars face failure and surprises: experiments can generate completely unexpected results, well thought out projects can have unintended consequences, hypotheses can simply be wrong, interventions can have no effect, and meaningful interpretations of data can elude us. All too often, scientific discovery is a game of patience—of relentlessly trying yet another experiment, after yet another failure. Knowledge is rarely developed at a steady marching pace. Instead, knowledge advances in lurches—in the unsteady, unpredictable movements of scholars who, according to psychologist Daniel Wegner, bumble along, only once in a while discovering something noteworthy.