Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [215]
* This asymmetry can take a toll on relationships of all sorts. Psychological studies have shown that people in shared living situations generally think they do more chores than their housemates, that people in relationships tend to think they try harder than their partner to resolve conjugal issues, and that each of the colleagues collaborating on a project typically thinks he or she is pulling more weight than everyone else. Granted, sometimes there’s a genuine disparity between one person’s work and another’s. But at least as often, the hour I spent scrubbing the scum from the bathroom tiles (or talking about intimacy issues with my therapist, or drawing up a five-year budget for the project proposal) is just particularly real to me, whereas whatever work you might have done remains an abstraction—at worst unnoticed and at best fleetingly appreciated, but certainly not minutely calibrated in terms of time and energy expended.
* As Thomas Gilovich has pointed out, this is particularly true of negative first impressions, since the negativity serves as a deterrent to seeking out additional evidence. If I think you are an inconsiderate blowhard, I’m likely to avoid your company, thereby limiting my chances of ever coming across any evidence to the contrary.
* I’ve been writing about love of other people as a balm for our existential wounds, but love of God fulfills this need as well. Arguably, it fulfills it even better, since healing that wound is the explicit premise and promise of most of the world’s major religions. Through God’s love—our love of God, God’s love for us—we will find both unity and eternal life. Like the language of romantic love, the language of religion reflects this hope. We say that we are one with God; that when we walk with God, we never walk alone; that God will never forsake us; that God has entered our hearts. (Sometimes, in fact, the language of religion explicitly borrows from the language of romance: we speak of Jesus as the bridegroom, of people as married to God or the church.) It follows that (as we’ve seen) concluding that we were wrong about God can feel like heartbreak. Here, too, what is so devastating is not merely the error itself, nor even the loss of faith, but the vast existential chasm that opens at our feet.
* The oft-reported 50 percent divorce rate in the United States comes from a faulty calculation method and is not correct. The actual divorce rate is significantly lower—and, apparently, declining. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s still high (usually calculated between 36 and 40 percent), and astronomically so for second and third marriages: 60 percent and 73 percent, respectively.
* Sometimes, of course, there isn’t a gap between our self-knowledge and our self. If you believe that you are depressed, you are depressed; if you believe that you feel good, you feel good. Likewise, if you believe that you’re in love, you’re in love—even if, like Charles Swann, you later come to regard that belief as madness. After all, what other, better test for depression or happiness or infatuation could there be? Unlike in external matters (whether the breeze is hot or cold, whether the meeting is Tuesday or Wednesday), there is sometimes no truth about the self beyond the one we create. In these cases, who we think we are is, for all intents and purposes, who we are.
* This isn’t to say that radical change always represents an improvement. From the perspective of the convert, the transformation must always be for the better, but to an outsider, conversion experiences don’t necessarily balance the moral checkbook. Osha Davidson tells the story of the U.S. Senator Tom Watson, who was born in Georgia in 1856 and spent the early part of his career opposing racial injustice,