Making mistakes more beneficial than avoiding them for some people Error encouragement, she explains, allows individuals to explore and experiment and learn from their mistakes. This is in contrast to error avoidance training which discourages individuals from making mistakes.
The effectiveness of each of these training methods was examined on people with different levels of intelligence, openness to experience and conscientiousness. Payne and her colleagues found that the effectiveness of a particular training method depends greatly on the type of person receiving the training.
People with higher intelligence, she notes, perform better and show greater confidence in their ability to perform the behaviors learned in training when encouraged to make errors. The same holds true for people who exhibit high levels of openness to experience, she adds.