ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews social psychological and judgment and decision-making research to consider why autonomous learners may fail to learn and improve as when an employee's career success hinges upon learning autonomously. Learning is particularly challenging in environments that lack clear feedback indicating whether one's performance was strong or weak. While people often avoid giving negative feedback, it is also common for advisors to offer feedback that is more positive than it is accurate. Learners may handicap themselves in their quest to improve by preferentially seeking out feedback that they expect to be consistent with what they believe about themselves and their abilities over feedback that might challenge pre-existing views of the self. Unfortunately, even when feedback is of good quality and given often, there is no guarantee that it will result in learning. Another possibility for why someone might receive perfectly good feedback but fail to learn from it is that they do not recognize the feedback as good.
