I’m standing in a row of students at the front of the fifth grade classroom. The teacher, Sister Mary Methodia—both feared and disliked for her humorless disciplinarian approach to her vocation—is planted at the back of the room. The subject is Latin, and we are being quizzed.
When it’s my turn, she tells me my answer is wrong. Although not particularly strong in Latin, I believe I’m right about this. I have what Robert A. Burton calls the feeling of knowing. So I proceed to make my case, getting into a loud, probably ill-advised dispute with this formidable individual in a position of authority (it won’t be the last such dispute).
Then the unthinkable happens. Sister Mary Methodia accepts my argument and my answer. She publicly declares that I am right. I return to my seat in a state of triumph. But as I’m making my way down the aisle, my brain, still chewing on the question, suddenly spits out the error in my logic. Whoa! It turns out she was right, after all. Which means I was wrong.
I’ve never forgotten the disconnect between my intense feeling of knowing the answer and the clear realization that I did not know it. I wasn’t trying to finesse my way through a lesson I hadn’t studied for. In those moments at the front of the classroom, I had a powerful and unequivocal sense of conviction. I was absolutely certain I was right.
On Being Wrong
In her 2011 TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz asked her audience to describe how it feels to be wrong. Their answers included things like dreadful, thumbs down, and embarrassing.
She then pointed out that they were actually answering a different question, which is how it feels to realize you’re wrong.
She said, “just being wrong doesn’t feel like anything.” But a few minutes later, she amended that:
It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.
When you combine the fact that what we don’t know is more important than what we do know (if only because there’s vastly more that we don’t know) with this fact that we can’t tell we’re wrong when we’re being wrong, you may begin to see a bit of a problem shaping up.
Schulz provided an example from the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to illustrate the point. In his attempts to best Road Runner, Coyote has numerous encounters with gravity. In each case, he remains blissfully confident of a positive outcome right up until the uh-oh moment he realizes it’s not going to end well.
He’s a cartoon character, so he will live, figuratively speaking, to chase Road Runner another day. In my fifth-grade Latin class, there were no lasting consequences for providing the wrong answer. But sometimes the stakes are high—or at least higher.
Confidence Game
I wrote Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty about six and a half years ago, but it’s very apt right now: both for the time we’re living through and for the current Monthly Meeting topic.
Our brain craves certainty, perceiving it to be of high value when it comes to survival. But the brain is much better at going all in on something than it is at making distinctions. It doesn’t just want to be right when it comes to survival; it wants to be right about everything! At its behest, we use the degree of confidence we feel as an indicator of how right we believe we are.
Confidence, of course, is a feeling and therefore subjective. There is no relationship between our level of confidence and the accuracy of our knowledge, memory, or understanding. We can just as easily be confidently delusional as confidently knowledgeable.
More to the point, if what we see is all there is, as Daniel Kahneman says, and if we are actually right about everything we’re convinced we’re right about, we have successfully eliminated the possibility of possibility. That’s a condition that may keep System 1 (the unconscious part of the brain) happy. But it will not assist us in creating a satisfying and meaningful life.
Recently a client proposed the idea of a mindset switch from believing we have to be right to acknowledging we could be wrong. It reminded me of the comment exchange on the Addiction to Certainty article on my blog that involved a British musician, a poet from the Midwest, and me. It concluded with Donald Fulmer, the poet, creating several I Could Be Wrong haiku.
take a deep breath
slowly repeat after me
I could be wrong
there is no way
just no way – OK maybe
I could be wrong
I know
what I’m talking about – Well
I could be wrong
I could be wrong
I could be wrong
I could be wrong
click your heels
three times and repeat
I could be wrong
Like it or not, if we want to create transformational change, we have to not only be willing to consider that we might be wrong, we have to actively seek out and embrace all the places and spaces where we could be wrong. That’s unsettling. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s also ultimately expansive and invigorating.
What could you be wrong about?