we are exceptionally bad at saying “I was wrong”—or at least, we are bad at leaving it at that. For most of us, it’s tough not to tack that “but” onto every admission of error. (Try saying an unadorned “I was wrong”—the full stop at the end, the silence afterward—and you’ll see how unfamiliar and uncomfortable it feels.) In part, this reflects our dislike of sitting with our wrongness any longer than necessary, since the “but” helps hasten us away from our errors. But it also reflects our urge to explain everything in the world—an urge that extends, emphatically, to our own mistakes. This
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