Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [146]
Singular, aberrational, transgressive, evil: we’ve seen this constellation of ideas before. This is the pessimistic model of wrongness, in which error is an unwelcome anomaly, a mark of our exile from the sacred realm of truth. Helpfully, this reminds us that we have another model for making sense of wrongness as well—one that casts a different light not only on our errors but also on ourselves. Here, wrongness is a natural and ongoing process, and we are not deformed but transformed by it. “The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through,” wrote the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, “and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence.” But, of course, we don’t say this of organic entities like buds and blossoms and fruit. And we need not say it about ourselves, either. In the optimistic model of wrongness, error is not a sign that our past selves were failures and falsehoods. Instead, it is one of those forces, like sap and sunlight, that imperceptibly helps another organic entity—us human beings—to grow up.
When you were a little kid, you were fabulously wrong about things all the time. In large part, this was because you suffered from a serious information deficit: the quantity of even extremely basic facts that eluded you was staggering. To take just one example, you didn’t know much about your own body. Developmental psychologists have shown that children under four have no idea what brains do, and think that dolls are as likely to possess them as humans. Similarly, children under seven can typically name only three things found inside the body (blood, bones, and the heart) and are drastically wide of the mark when it comes to the nature and function of other internal organs. (One psychologist quotes a child as saying that lungs “are for your hair. Without them you couldn’t have hair.”) Likewise, most kids under eight think that boys can become girls and girls can become boys simply by changing their hairstyle and clothing.
The issue here isn’t that kids aren’t smart, or that they aren’t generating sophisticated theories about human biology and everything else in the world. In both cases, they are. (As you might recall from Chapter Five, all of us begin theorizing about the world before we’re out of diapers.) The issue, instead, is that children suffer from a shortage of data—and not just about their bodies, but about everything: people, objects, language, culture, politics, the laws that govern the physical world. Sometimes they haven’t stumbled across the necessary information yet, and sometimes they haven’t reached a developmental stage where they can grasp it. And sometimes, too, information is deliberately withheld from them—which explains why children are often particularly wrong about things like the mechanics of sex and reproduction, the identity of their biological parents, and how (or even that) a family member has died.*
Compounding the problem of insufficient information is the problem of bad information. Children believe in things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy not because they are particularly credulous but for the same reasons the rest of us believe our beliefs. Their information about these phenomena comes from trusted sources (typically, their parents) and is often supported by physical evidence (cookie crumbs by the chimney, quarters under the pillow). It isn’t the kids’ fault that the evidence is fabricated and that their sources mislead them. Nor is it their fault that their primary community, outside of their family, generally consists of other children, who tend to be equally ill-informed. Given what we saw earlier about the influence of community on beliefs, you can imagine (or simply recall) how readily bad information spreads around lunchrooms and playgrounds. A friend captures this funny state of childhood belief systems nicely when he recollects that, “At some point