Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [153]
If you are GE, or Motorola, or American Airlines, you have a very good reason to invest in these error-prevention strategies. Without them, you will risk endangering lives, incurring damning publicity, inviting legal action, and losing money, clients, and possibly your entire business. For corporations, in other words, paying attention to error pays. Between 1986 and 2006, Motorola reported savings of more than $17 billion thanks to Six Sigma. Likewise, when the University of Michigan medical system implemented an apologize-and-explain program, their annual legal fees dropped from $3 million to $1 million. On a national level, the savings to be gained are similarly significant: according to the Institute of Medicine, medical mistakes cost the United States between $17 billion and $29 billion annually. (That’s why preventing medical errors is widely regarded as a way to offset some of the skyrocketing costs of healthcare.) And that’s not even including those expenses that are difficult or impossible to quantify, from company reputation to customer satisfaction—to say nothing of customer lives.
If it behooves companies in such material and moral ways to accept their fallibility and own up to their mistakes, surely the same goes for each of us as individuals—and for all of us as communities, cultures, and nations. We’ve already gotten a good look at the obstacles to doing so: at the difficulty of recognizing the limits of our knowledge, the allure of certainty, and the defensiveness and denial we often resort to in the aftermath of our mistakes. And yet, despite all that, sometimes we are able to embrace uncertainty and error—and not just in domains where life, limb, and finance demand it, but in the tussle and clamor of everyday life.
One of the first words all of us learn is: no. Sure, “daddy” or “mama” or “more” or “up” might edge it out, but the capacity for negation and refusal comes to us very, very early—typically within the first twelve to eighteen months of life. It is soon followed (or, less often, preceded) by “yes,” and, for a while, that’s the kind of world we live in: a black-and-white, yes-and-no universe. Psychologists call this developmental stage “splitting.”* Right around the age of five, though, something interesting happens: we learn the word “maybe.” This first tentative foray marks the beginning of our ability to acknowledge, quantify, and talk about uncertainty. As such, it also marks a major step toward learning—like the corporations and hospitals we just saw—to incorporate the possibility of error into our lives.
From that first “maybe,” our language blossoms outward into both a glossary and a grammar of doubt. I’ve claimed elsewhere in this book that we are drawn to adamancy, that we treat our theories like facts and are made uncomfortable by ambiguity and error. All that is true. But it’s also true that, circumstances permitting, we are not only able to express uncertainty but are extraordinarily creative and resourceful in how we do so. This creativity begins with words (perhaps, probably, hypothetically, doubtful, debatable, sometimes, occasionally, conceivably), and extends to entire grammatical functions. The conditional tense—coulda, shoulda, woulda—excels at the expression of regret and uncertainty. The subjunctive, not a tense but (appropriately) a mood, connotes doubt, improbability, and false beliefs; its prevailing atmosphere is one of ambiguity. The subjunctive has largely disappeared from English, lingering only in grammatical niceties like, “If that were true, I would be the first to admit it.” In Romance languages, though, it is alive and well—the default idiom of dreams, hopes, suppositions, counterfactual situations, and disbelief.
From these linguistic building blocks, we construct countless verbal