How do early career setbacks affect our long-term success? Failures can help us learn and overcome our fears. But disasters can still wound us, screw us up and set us back.
One way social scientists have probed the effects of career setbacks is to look at scientists of very similar qualifications who, for reasons that are mostly arbitrary, either just missed getting a research grant or who just barely made it.
Studies in this area have found conflicting results. In the competitive game of biomedical science, research on scientists who narrowly lost or won grant money suggests that narrow winners become even bigger winners down the line.
A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, followed researchers in the Netherlands, and concluded that those who just barely qualified for a grant were able to get twice as much money within the next eight years as those who just missed. And the narrow winners were 50% more likely to be given a professorship. Others in the U.S. have found similar effects with National Institutes of Health early-career fellowships catapulting narrow winners far ahead of close losers.
Studies in this area have found conflicting results.
The phenomenon is often referred to as the Matthew effect, inspired by the New Testament’s wisdom that to those who have, more will be given. There’s a good explanation for the phenomenon in the book, “The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success,” by Albert Laszlo Barabasi: It’s easier and less risky for those in positions of power to choose to bestow awards and funding on those who’ve already been so recognized.
Other studies using the same technique have shown there’s sometimes no penalty to a near miss: students who just miss getting into top high schools or universities do just as well later in life as those who squeak in.
So is there any evidence that setbacks might actually improve our career prospects? There is now. In a study published this month in Nature Communications, Northwestern University sociologist Dashun Wang tracked more than 1,100 scientists who were on the border between getting a grant and missing out between 1990 and 2005. He followed various measures of performance over the next decade.
As expected, there was a much higher rate of attrition among scientists who didn’t get grants. But among those who stayed on, the close losers performed even better than the narrow winners. To make sure this wasn’t a fluke, Wang said he conducted additional tests using different performance measures, such as how many times people were first authors on influential studies.
One reason close losers might outperform narrow winners is that the two groups have comparable ability, but the losers were culled so that only the most determined, passionate scientists remained. Wang said he tried to correct for this by culling what he deemed the weakest members of the winner group – but the persevering losers still came out on top. He thinks that being close loser might give people a psychological boost, or the proverbial kick in the pants.
Utrecht University sociologist Arnout van de Rijt, who was lead author on the 2018 paper showing the rich get richer, said the new finding is plausible and worth some attention. His own work showed that although the narrow winners did get much more money in the near future, the actual performance of the close losers was just as good.
Van de Rijt said he’s not convinced that losing out gives people a psychological boost. It may yet be a selection effect. Even though Wang tried to account for this by culling the weakest winners, it’s impossible to know which of the winners would have quit if they were on the losing side.
These papers deal with a kind of failure people have little control over – rejection. Others determine who wins and who loses. But at the very least, this research is starting to show that early setbacks don’t have to be fatal. They might even make us better at our jobs.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
