The Field Guide › Paper
Catalano, Redford, Margoluis and Knight bring the psychology of learning from failure into conservation, asking why a field that fails often learns from its failures so rarely. Their framing is Taleb's black swan: the rare, high-impact event that looks obvious only in hindsight, which is exactly the kind of failure conservation produces and then explains away. The paper's real contribution is cognitive: it catalogues the mental and social barriers that stop organisations extracting lessons from failure, and they are the same barriers this corpus meets everywhere else. Hindsight bias makes a failure look predictable after the fact, so no genuine lesson is drawn (we knew all along). Self-serving attribution credits success to one's own skill and charges failure to external circumstance, which protects the ego at the cost of the analysis. And the reputational and emotional cost of admitting failure, together with the blame that failure attracts, makes honesty about what went wrong personally expensive, so the post-mortem that learning depends on either never happens or happens dishonestly. Against these, the authors argue for the cognitive habits and the cultural conditions (a climate safe enough to name failure without being punished for it) under which failure can become information rather than embarrassment. For a corpus about psychological safety this paper is doubly useful: it is the conservation-and-ecology instance of Edmondson's learning-from-failure argument, showing that the obstacles to learning are not domain-specific but cognitive and social, and it connects the ecological strand of the map to the psychology of blame and attribution that the safety and accountability strands turn on. The same reflexive protection of self and status that keeps a hospital or a cockpit from learning keeps a conservation programme from learning too. Its limits are those of a conceptual argument: it reasons from established cognitive science to conservation practice rather than presenting new evidence of conservation learning, and its remedies are stated as principles rather than a tested intervention. (Text drawn from the 2018 Conservation Biology paper, 32(3), pp. 584-596.)