Deliberately making miskates

Is failure an inherently negative state? We argue that failure has repercussions for performance not because of its negative valence but because of the default expectation of success. Across three experiments (n = 201), undergraduate participants engaged in Matching Pennies games where they had to perform as well (win maximization) and as poorly (lose maximization) as possible against exploitable opponents. We showed a double dissociation in that both win-stay and win-shift behaviours were more consistent than lose-stay and lose-shift behaviours during win maximization, but that both lose-stay and lose-shift behaviours were more consistent than win-stay and win-shift behaviours during loss maximization. This remarkable flexibility in the ability to reconfigure fundamental reinforcement learning principles, and the arbitrary nature of positive and negative goal states, point to a wholesale reconfiguration of the way we think about and react to failure.