Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts.

If we relish being right and regard it as our natural state, you can imagine how we feel about being wrong. For one thing, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre—an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. For

another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed.

Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our

ideas about the world.

that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.

If philosophy has traditionally sought to unify and define wrongness, a far newer field—the multidisciplinary effort known sometimes as human factors research and sometimes as decision studies—has sought to subdivide and classify it.

we are usually much more willing to entertain the possibility that we are wrong about insignificant matters than about weighty ones.

By examining our sense of certainty and our reaction to error in cases where we turn out to be objectively wrong, we can learn to think differently about our convictions in situations where no one will ever have the final say.

If it is literally impossible to feel wrong—if our current mistakes remain imperceptible to us even when we scrutinize our innermost being for signs of them—then it makes sense for us to conclude that we are right. Similarly, error-blindness helps explain why we accept fallibility as a universal phenomenon yet are constantly startled by our own mistakes.

Most of us don’t have a mental category called “Mistakes I Have Made.”

realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time: something else instantly becomes the new right. In light of this new belief, the discarded one can quickly come to seem remote, indistinct, and irrelevant, as if we never took it all that seriously in the first place.

shores up our tacit assumption that current belief is identical with true belief, and it reinforces our generalized sense of rightness.

That’s part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with ourselves. Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one—a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftermath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

the experience of being wrong is hardly limited at all. Surprise, bafflement, fascination, excitement, hilarity,

delight: all these and more are a part of the optimistic understanding of error.

As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error.

scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs.

the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet.

The truths he cared about are the ones we stash away in our unconscious. By definition, those truths are inaccessible to the reasoning mind—but, Freud argued in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we can catch occasional glimpses of them, and one way we do so is through error. Today, we know these truth-revealing errors as Freudian slips—as

To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story.

To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in that spirit that this book is written.

defining features of illusions: they are robust, meaning that our eyes fall for them even when our higher cognitive functions are aware that we are being deceived. A second defining feature is that they are consistent: we misperceive them every time we come across them. Finally, they are universal: all of us misperceive them in precisely the same way.*

inattentional blindness in action. It turns out that when we ask people to look for something specific, they develop a startling inability to see things in general.

illusions are a gateway drug to humility. If we have trouble acknowledging our own errors and forgiving those of others, at least we can begin by contemplating the kind of mistakes to which we all succumb.

we love to know things, but ultimately we can’t know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing when we don’t know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up.

All this serves to render the category of “knowledge” unreliable—so much so that this chapter exists largely to convince you to abandon it (if only temporarily, for the purpose of understanding wrongness) in favor of the category of belief.

confabulate means, basically, to make stuff up;

manifestations of our unstoppable drive to tell stories that make sense of our world.

Surprise is a response to the violation of our expectations, an emotional indicator that our theories were in error.

Most of us, however, are noticeably better at generating theories than at registering our own ignorance. Hirstein says that once he began studying confabulation, he started seeing sub-clinical versions of it everywhere he looked, in the form of neurologically normal people “who seem unable to say the words, ‘I don’t know,’ and will quickly produce some sort of plausible-sounding response to whatever they are asked.” Such people, he says, “have a sort of mildly confabulatory personality.”*

This book is about our Greenspan moments: about what happens when our beliefs, including our most fundamental, convincing, and important ones, fail us.

In the literal sense, a model of the world is a map, and that’s basically what beliefs are, too: mental representations of our physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and political

landscapes.

If anything can rival for sheer drama the demise of a belief that we have adamantly espoused, it is the demise of a belief so fundamental to our lives that we never even registered its existence.

Color and sound and emotion are all central to how we experience and make sense of the world, but they can’t inhere in the world itself, because they cease to exist the moment you take minds out of the picture. Conversely, plenty of things exist in the world that the human mind cannot experience directly: the infrared spectrum, the structure of molecules, and very possibly a dozen or so extra dimensions.

“representational theory of mind.” That is, they’ve figured out what a mind is, at least in general terms—not a photocopy of reality but a private and somewhat idiosyncratic means for making sense of the world—and

new insights: that beliefs about the world can be at odds with the world itself; that my beliefs can be at odds with yours; that other people don’t necessarily know everything I know; and, conversely, that I don’t necessarily know everything other people know.

allows us to “read minds,” not as psychics use the term but as psychologists do—to infer people’s thoughts and feelings based

on their words, actions, or circumstances.

theory of mind is vital to our emotional, intellectual, and moral development. (Tragically, we have some idea of how compromised we would be without it, because its absence or diminution is characteristic of people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome.*)

When it comes to our specific convictions about the world, however, we all too easily lapse back into the

condition of toddlers, serenely convinced that our own beliefs are simply, necessarily true.†

once I’ve rejected a belief, I can often only perceive the self-serving reasons I believed it, and can no longer recognize any evidence for it as rationally compelling.

if we want to discredit a belief, we will argue that it is advantageous, whereas if we want to champion it, we will argue that it is true. That’s why we downplay or dismiss the self-serving aspects of our own convictions, even as we are quick to detect them in other people’s beliefs.

Psychologists refer to this asymmetry as “the bias blind spot.”

So we look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look at our beliefs and see reality. This is the essence of the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint:

Ignorance Assumption. Since we think our own beliefs are based on the facts, we conclude that people who disagree with us just haven’t been exposed to the right information, and that such exposure would inevitably bring them over to our team.

The Ignorance Assumption isn’t always wrong; sometimes our ideological adversaries don’t know the facts. But it isn’t always right, either. For starters, ignorance isn’t necessarily a vacuum waiting to be filled; just as often, it is a wall, actively maintained. More to the point, though, the Ignorance Assumption can be wrong because we can be wrong: the facts might contradict our own beliefs, not those of our adversaries. Alternatively, the facts might be sufficiently ambiguous to support multiple interpretations. That we generally ignore this possibility speaks to the powerful asymmetry of the Ignorance Assumption.

Idiocy Assumption. Here, we concede that our opponents know the facts, but deny that they have the brains to comprehend them.