Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [129]
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: E. “I don’t really think that my word completions reveal that much about me…occurred as a result of happenstance.”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: E. “I think this girl is on her period…I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship, according to the words WHORE, SLOT (similar to slut), CHEAT…”
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: F. “I think word completions are limited in this ability [to reveal anything about the subject].”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: F. “He seems to focus on competition and winning. This person could be an athlete or someone who is very competitive.”
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: G. “For nearly every word-stem, only one possible solution came to mind.”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: G. “If I had to guess, I’d say that this subject is a nature-lover type.”
One thing this study demonstrates is our aptitude, amply illustrated elsewhere in this book, for making sweeping and specific inferences on the basis of extremely scanty information. But it also reveals the striking difference between our sense of how justly we can make those inferences about others and how justly they can be made about us. It’s as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible.
This is, for one thing, a methodological problem: we think we can know other people based on criteria we reject for ourselves. But it is also, and more pressingly, an emotional problem. When Pronin and her colleagues wrote up the word-fragment study for The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they called their paper, “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You”—a title that sounds at first like a taunt, and then resolves into a lament. If I am only truly knowable from the inside, no one but me can truly know me. This isolation within ourselves can be mitigated (by intimacy with other people), and it can be dodged (by not thinking about it), but it cannot be eradicated. It is, as I stated at the start of this chapter, the fundamental condition of our existence. There is a story (which is so lovely that I hope it’s true, although I haven’t been able to verify it) that someone once asked the South African writer J. M. Coetzee to name his favorite novel. Coetzee replied that it was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—because, he explained, the story of a man alone on an island is the only story there is.
Crusoe named his small island Despair, and the choice was apt. Despair—the deep, existential kind—stems from the awareness that we are each marooned on the island of our self, that we will live and die there alone. We are cut off from all the other islands, no matter how numerous and nearby they appear; we cannot swim across the straits, or swap our island for a different one, or even know for sure that the other ones exist outside the spell of our own senses. Certainly we cannot know the particulars of life on those islands—the full inner experience of our mother or our best friend or our sweetheart or our child. There is, between us and them—between us and everything—an irremediable rift.
We have met this rift over and over in this book. It is the same one that keeps us separated from and fated only to speculate about the rest of the universe; the same one whose existence leaves us vulnerable to error. I’ve said that the sudden recognition of this rift is the essence of the experience of wrongness. But now it turns out that recognizing this rift can also be the essence of the experience of despair. Encountering it, we are reminded that we are alone on our islands, cut off from one another and from the essential truths of the world. Our errors and our existential angst spring