Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [40]
Hirstein noted something else peculiar about confabulators as well. Whenever any of us is asked a question, we can respond in one of three ways (assuming that we are not out to deceive anyone). If we know the answer, we will respond correctly. If we don’t know the answer, and we realize that we don’t know it, we will admit to being stumped. Finally, if we think we know the answer when we do not, we will respond confidently but incorrectly.
For anosognosic confabulators, the first possibility is ruled out: they are neurologically unable to provide the right answers to questions about their impairment. But, Hirstein observed, they are also unable to recognize that they don’t know the right answers. “Apparently,” he wrote, “admitting ignorance in response to a question, rather than being an indication of glibness and a low level of function, is a high-level cognitive ability, one that confabulators have lost. ‘I don’t know,’ can be an intelligent answer to a question, or at least an answer indicative of good cognitive health.” Maybe so, but this same inability to say “I don’t know” also afflicted the majority of participants in Nisbett and Wilson’s study—confabulators who, to all appearances, enjoyed perfectly fine cognitive health.
It’s not exactly news that most people are reluctant to admit their ignorance. But the point here is not that we are bad at saying “I don’t know.” The point is that we are bad at knowing we don’t know. The feeling of not knowing is, to invert James’s formulation, the bell that fails to chime—or, at any rate, the one whose chime we fail to hear. The problem, I suspect, is that we are confused about what ignorance actually feels like. At first blush, it seems that the feeling should be one of blankness, of nothing coming to mind when an answer is required. And sometimes, as when the question we face is a simple matter of fact, this is how ignorance feels: if you ask me who the prime minster of Kyrgyzstan is, I will have no trouble recognizing that I haven’t the foggiest idea. For the most part, though, the feeling of blankness is a lousy guide to ignorance—because, thanks to our aptitude for generating stories, stuff is almost always coming to mind. As a result, to know that we don’t know, we can’t just passively wait around to see if our mind comes up empty. Instead, we need to actively identify and reject all the incorrect or ill-grounded hypotheses our inner writer is madly generating.
How good we are at doing this varies significantly from person to person. Some of us have voluble and inventive inner writers, some of us have meticulous inner fact-checkers, and a lucky few have both. Most of us, however, are noticeably better at generating theories than at registering our own ignorance. Hirstein says that once he began studying confabulation, he started seeing sub-clinical versions of it everywhere he looked, in the form of neurologically normal people “who seem unable to say the words, ‘I don’t know,’ and will quickly produce some sort of plausible-sounding response to whatever they are asked.” Such people, he says, “have a sort of mildly confabulatory personality.”*
Actually, all of us have mildly confabulatory personalities. Take (just for example) me. Not long ago, I found myself participating in a lively discussion about the likely accuracy of string theory. The contributors to this conversation included a lawyer, a labor organizer, an environmental consultant, a graduate student in philosophy, and a journalist (me).