Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [13]
Granted, Ross’s mistake was particularly awkward. But it was not particularly consequential—not for Meadows, who was gracious about it; not for Ross; not even for Ross’s career. So wasn’t wanting to die something of an extreme reaction? Maybe. But if so, it is an extreme reaction to which we all sometimes succumb. Indeed, one of our recurrent responses to error is to wish ourselves out of existence. Describing the moment of realizing certain mistakes, we say that we wanted to crawl into a cave, or fall through a hole in the floor, or simply disappear. And we talk about “losing face,” as if our mistakes really did cause us to disappear—as if our identity was rubbed out by the experience of being wrong.
In addition to this death-wish response to error, we have another reaction that is less drastic. But more gastric: sometimes, instead of wanting to die, we just want to vomit. Or so one might assume from the strangely culinary vocabulary we use to talk about being wrong. In the aftermath of our mistakes, we eat crow, eat humble pie, eat our hat, or, at the other end of the sartorial menu, eat our shoe. And, of course, we eat our words. These sayings differ in their origins, but the overall implication is clear: error is both extremely unappetizing and very tough to digest. If being right is succulent, being wrong runs a narrow, unhappy gamut from nauseating to worse than death.
This is the received wisdom about error: that it is dangerous, humiliating, distasteful, and, all told, un-fun in the extreme. This view of error—let’s call it the pessimistic model—has some merit. As I acknowledged earlier (and as everyone knows), our mistakes really can be irritating or humiliating or harmful, to ourselves as well as to others. To dismiss that fact would be disingenuous, but as an overall outlook on wrongness, the pessimistic one is radically incomplete. To begin with, it obscures the fact that whatever damage can arise from erring pales in comparison to the damage that arises from our fear, dislike, and denial of erring. This fear acts as a kind of omnipurpose coagulant, hardening heart and mind, chilling our relationships with other people, and cooling our curiosity about the world.
Like many fears, the fear of being wrong stems partly from a lack of understanding. The pessimistic model of error tells us that wrongness is unpleasant, but it doesn’t tell us why, and it has nothing at all to say about errors that don’t turn out to be disagreeable. To account for the breadth of our real-life experiences with wrongness, we need to pair the pessimistic outlook with another one. In this second, optimistic model of error, the experience of being wrong isn’t limited to humiliation and defeat. Actually, in this model, the experience of being wrong is hardly limited at all. Surprise, bafflement, fascination, excitement, hilarity, delight: all these and more are a part of the optimistic understanding of error. This model is harder to recognize around us, since it is forever being crowded out by the noisier notion that error is dangerous, demoralizing, and shameful. But it exists nonetheless, and it exerts a subtle yet important pull both on our ideas about error and on our ideas about ourselves.
These two models of error, optimistic and pessimistic, are in perpetual tension with each other. We could try to study them in isolation—the discomforts and dangers of being wrong over here, its delights and dividends over there—and we could try to adjudicate between them. But it is when we take these two models together, not when we take