Wrongology - 2: Reactions to be Being Proven Wrong

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz also talks about how we deal with the times we are wrong. But you know that already: denial, excuses etc. Where Schulz makes the topic so interesting is when she points out the reason isn’t (always) ego or malicious agendas.

Far more often, we change the question from “Were we wrong?” to “How wrong were we?”. And rarely is the answer that we come up, “Totally”:

“Almost no matter what we were wrong about, we can find countless different ways to take the measure of our mistakes.”

Put differently, we don’t want to introspect, at least not honestly:

“We are not so much honestly trying to size up our errors as frantically trying to downsize them.”

Here are the usual ways we go about it:

1)      “Time-frame defense”: I can see the big picture, the long term. You don’t have the patience. Just you wait and see etc.

2)     “Near-miss defense”: But for some silly, minor event, what I said/thought would have come true. If the butterfly hadn’t flapped its wings…

3)     “Out-of-left-field defense”: Some bizarre and unforeseeable event “derailed the natural course of things”.

4)     I trusted the wrong person/group/authority figure defense: I may have been wrong, but only in trusting the other guy. It wasn’t my assessment.

5)     Better safe than sorry defense: Better to cry wolf when I thought one was there than to have stayed quiet and gotten eaten up the wolf.

Of course, we often see flat-out denial. When others resort to it:

“We are quick to sneer at it, to regard it as the last, sorry refuge of those who are too immature, insecure, or pig-headed to face the truth.”

But, that’s not what’s happening, writes Schulz:

“Denial has a bad reputation… Denial is not, after all, a response to the facts. It is a response to the feelings those facts evoke - and sometimes, those feelings are too much to bear… With error as with disaster, we screen out unwelcome information to protect ourselves from discomfort, anxiety, and trauma… pain, humiliation, guilt.”

Suddenly, the way we deal with mistakes begins to make sense, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it also explains why we don’t learn from our mistakes. Live and don’t learn: we seem to be wired that way.