When I’m looking for my next book to read, I’ll often seek out something outside of my lived experience – a novel about another country or culture, for example. It was with this same spirit of exploration and plucky curiosity that I picked up Kathryn Schulz’s new book On Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
To be honest, I’m often wrong. I wish being wrong was exotic territory for me. However, I take small comfort in believing that I’m not alone in my capacity to be egregiously, horrifyingly wrong. Following are some of the highlights of the Schulz’s book.
Fabulous confabulators (or 99 percent of all statistics are made up)
As Schulz typifies it, confabulation is the act of making things up. Things, in this case, range from white lies about our role in the high school championship game and statistics made up to win a friendly argument to misremembered or fabricated memories about a witnessed crime. She argues that we tell stories in order to “make sense of our world.” And when the world doesn’t make sense, we start confabulating.
The worst part is that our inner confabulator is so effective that we often don’t detect its influence. An interesting example from the book: Shoppers were presented with four packages of pantyhose, asked to pick which they preferred and explain why they made their decision. Their explanations centered around, for instance, the color and texture of the pantyhose.
Here’s the kicker: all the pantyhose were exactly the same. So, as Schulz points out, “since there were no differences among the pantyhose … these could only be post-hoc justifications.” Apparently, many of the shoppers stuck by their reasoning even after being told that the pantyhose were all exactly alike. Which leads to another issue: humans are bad at knowing when we are confabulating.
When issues of fact come up, such as who won Wimbeldon in 1973, we are fairly good at identifying whether we know or not. Where we get confused, and our inner confabulator gets busy, is when we talk about issues of taste, belief and opinion. In these cases, rather than the blankness that occurs when we don’t know a fact, our mind starts churning out theories. Ironically, the higher our cognitive ability, the better we are at creating sound and elegant theories. Still, these theories tend to be more confabulation than fact.
Another blossom along the primrose path of wrongness is our (useful) capacity for inductive reasoning. We learn from past experiences. Because we’ve become geniuses of inductive reasoning many of our explanations for simple phenomena are probably right – but by the same turn they’re possibly wrong. The more complex or foreign the phenomena, the less likely we are to be right, and the more our past experiences don’t accurately inform the scenario.
A third blossom in the flowerbed of fallacy is called confirmation bias, our tendency to value evidence that agrees with our position more highly than evidence that disagrees with us. This is troubling since, as a result of inductive reasoning, we can’t really trust our position to be right in the first place. And then, once we’re committed to a position, we seek out evidence that reinforces it. Enter FOX News and MSNBC. Furthermore, we build our communities around people who think like us and basically agree with us. Sadly, all signs point wrongward.
A short checklist for nipping wrongness in the bud
Here are actions we can take right now to be right more often:
- Admit that much of what we claim to know might be wrong.
- Respectfully engage other points of view.
- Get over being certain about everything – some things we just can’t know for certain.
- Own being wrong. Think of it as a useful thorn on the vine that feeds the rose of rightness.
- Forgive others for being wrong. Who knows? You might be wrong some day too.
What does this have to with politics?
We’ve got problems (globally, nationally and locally) and we need all hands on deck to get this right. We need to be able to work together and learn to admit when we’re wrong so that we can get down to the hard yards of moving forward. Of course, I could be wrong…
Nick Voges is the blogger behind NMPolitics.net’s Zeitgeist. E-mail him at nick@nmpolitics.net.