How Important Is Your Need to Be Right?

A heavy investment in being right can lead to all kinds of problems, large and small, personally and interpersonally, even nationally and globally. The underlying source of our drive to be right is survival. Being right enhances our chances of staying alive. In the distant past, if we were wrong too often or about something really important—such as which food was poisonous or which animal was dangerous—we could have ended up dead.

Being and proving we’re right are knee-jerk reactions to perceived threats. Most of us no longer face the same daily threats to life our long-ago ancestors faced. But our brain doesn’t quite get that because it hasn’t changed all that much. It still operates the same way. To our unconscious (System 1), a threat is a threat is a threat—and that includes threats to our beliefs, our opinions, and our good feelings about ourselves and the people we care about. Furthermore, we not only want to see ourselves as being right, we want others to see us that way, too.

Our need to be right gets in the way of clarity in a couple of different ways.

First, refusing to acknowledge we could be wrong about something automatically clouds our judgment. It restricts what we are able to see and understand because we screen out anything that conflicts with the scenario in which we are right.

Second, an investment in being right creates a singular agenda. Rather than focusing on doing the right, or appropriate, thing in the situation, we’re more concerned about being right—or being seen as right—about what we’re doing.

When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. We get addicted to being right. …Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. —Judith E. Glaser, Organizational Anthropologist

No one enjoys admitting they’re wrong, even to themselves. But we’re all wrong much more often than we’re right. And nobody’s perfect.

What you can do:

• Recognize that you’re not alone: everyone has the same hardwired need to be right and to be seen as right.

• If you’re feeling stuck about something, ask yourself if wanting to be right is getting in the way of your judgment or your ability to think clearly.

• Remind yourself that you’re not still trying to survive on the savannah. Being wrong may be unpleasant or uncomfortable, but it’s highly unlikely to be fatal.

Additional reading: Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?