Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [216]
* There is a secular version of this idea, too; I call it “friends don’t let friends be wrong.” This is what happens when you try to tell a friend about a mistake you made, and she hastens to assure you that it really wasn’t a mistake—that you did the best you could in the moment, or that you learned from it and so it was “for the best” or “meant to be.” Of course, sometimes we did do the best we could, and sometimes do learn from our mistakes. But this doesn’t mean they weren’t mistakes. A mistake is a mistake whether we make it for a dumb reason or a smart one, whether it has a bad outcome or a good one. If we decree that mistakes aren’t really mistakes when they arise from a positive process (doing our best) or result in a positive outcome (learning something), we reinforce the notion that wrongness is intrinsically negative.
* Death and reproduction are particularly common areas of confusion and error for kids, partly because so much information about these subjects is kept from them, and partly because even for adults, it’s tough to fathom how we get existence from nonexistence, or, conversely, nonexistence from existence. The developmental psychologist Susan Carey tells the story of a child who, when asked to explain reproduction, “gravely explained that to create a baby, parents first buy a duck, which then turns into a rabbit, which then turns into a baby.” When queried further (by, one imagines, some very puzzled researchers), the child claimed that he had learned this from a book—as it turns out, one that eschewed a description of sexual intercourse in favor of talking about bunnies and ducklings.
† In claiming that error is essentially a mechanism for learning, I’m not trying to make the opposite claim: that learning is essentially contingent on error. We do learn from our mistakes, but we also learn in a wide variety of other ways: through imitation, intervention, practice, and explicit instruction, to name just a few.
* To excuse their defensiveness and silence, doctors often point to the threat of being sued. But such fears might be largely unfounded. For starters, thirty-five states have now passed “I’m sorry” laws, which prevent physicians’ apologies from being used against them in malpractice suits. Moreover, evidence suggests that openly disclosing and apologizing for errors might actually decrease the likelihood of being sued. In 1987, after facing a couple of high-profile, high-cost malpractice suits, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, became the first hospital in the nation to implement an apologize-and-disclose policy for medical error. In the thirty-plus years since then, the hospital has gone to court only three times. Over that same period, its legal fees have dropped dramatically, and its average per-patient settlement has been $16,000; the nationwide average for similar hospitals is $98,000. These statistics aren’t surprising when you consider a few others—for instance, that 40 percent of medical-error victims say that a full explanation and apology would have prevented them from seeking legal action.
* Remember how I argued, earlier in this book, that we associate error with deviation from normal or desirable conditions—and, by extension, with evil and sin? Six Sigma presents both an unusually explicit and an unusually benign—in fact, beneficial—example of this set of associations. Among Six Sigma aficionados, deviation is not only taken to represent an error but also routinely referred to as (these are actual quotes) “the enemy” and “evil.”
† Another interesting example of the use of transparency to curtail error comes from the open-source movement. Originally developed within computer science, the movement grew out of the belief that the more visible the workings of any given system, the more