Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [104]
Take the Millerites. All of them faced the task of unraveling a single, shared error to its point of origin. Where, exactly, had they gone wrong? At one end of the range of possible answers lies the flat disavowal of error. This is the realm of denial, where mistakes come only in size zero. You might think that every Millerite would have had to acknowledge at least some degree of error after the Great Disappointment—the continued existence of the planet being, after all, the forcing function par excellence. But no: displaying their powers of imagination and defying our own, the truly diehard among the Millerites declined to admit that they had been wrong in any respect. Instead, in a somewhat dazzling act of revisionist theology, they claimed that Christ really had returned to earth—by entering the hearts of his followers, who now dwelt with him in (terrestrial) paradise.
If denial demarcates one extreme end of the range of possible answers to “how wrong?”, the other end is defined by acceptance. But acceptance is a trickier, more elastic condition than denial. There is a limit to how small our errors can get, and that limit is nonexistence. But there isn’t necessarily a limit to how large they can get.* Of those Millerites who generally accepted that they had been wrong, some abandoned belief in God altogether. Others simply parted ways with organized religion. Still others repudiated only the teachings of William Miller. As this suggests, even sincere acknowledgment of error comes in many sizes, each with radically different implications for the person who has erred.
I’ll talk more about denial and acceptance in the next chapter, since they represent two especially important aspects of our relationship to error. For now, though, I want to focus on the messy middle of our “how wrong?” responses. These responses are characterized neither by full acceptance nor by flat denial, but rather by downplaying, hedging, backpedaling, justifying, or otherwise minimizing the scope of our mistakes. You don’t need me to tell you that this kind of minimization is exceedingly common. Remember the situation I described in the last chapter, where we stand outside someone else’s car, persistently trying to open it with our own key? I cribbed that example from the psychologist Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, an indictment of poorly conceived objects—from door handles to nuclear reactors—and how we discover and correct the mistakes they cause us to make. Norman writes that, in every situation he has studied, “the error correction [process] seems to start at the lowest possible level and slowly works its way higher.” That is, we tend to suspect that something is wrong with the key or that something is wrong with the lock long before we suspect that we’ve got the wrong car—or that we only imagined having a car in the first place, or that while we were shopping aliens came down from space and injected Martian superglue into our locks. Although Norman is essentially an error-studies specialist, and as such focuses primarily on mechanical and procedural errors rather than beliefs, I suspect that his observation holds across the board: we all incline toward conservatism when it comes to determining the size of our mistakes.
We’ve already seen that a certain amount of conservatism in the face of challenges to our worldview is both normal and defensible. Just as it is rarely to our advantage to contemplate the possibility that a giraffe had a long flight from Kenya, it is rarely to our advantage to contemplate the possibility that our car door has been glued shut by aliens. Sometimes, though, this conservatism, which begins as a smart cognitive strategy, winds up looking like a desperate emotional one. In those situations, as we are about to see—and as the Millerites were kind enough to demonstrate for us—we are not so much honestly trying to size up our errors as frantically trying