Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [84]
In a practical sense, then, it’s clear that we sometimes behave as if a proposition is true before we have had a chance to evaluate it. Gilbert and his colleagues wanted to find out if this is only how we behave, or if it is actually how we believe. They reasoned that if disbelieving a proposition consists of not one process but two—initially accepting and only subsequently rejecting it—then people should be more likely to believe untrue things if they are interrupted immediately after exposure to them. And that’s exactly what they found. In a series of experiments, subjects who were distracted immediately after learning new information were more likely to believe that false statements were true, but not more likely to believe that true statements were false. It was as if merely creating a mental image of a statement (the armadillo creeping toward the camembert) was sufficient to make the subjects believe it—another instance of confusing the ideas in our mind with realities about the world.
Aside from scoring a point for Spinoza, this research sheds some light on the cognitive basis for why certainty comes so much easier to us than doubt. But if this is a neurological truth, it is also, and more self-evidently, an emotional one. Certainty might be a practical, logical, and evolutionary necessity, but the simplest truth about it is that it feels good. It gives us the comforting illusion that our environment is stable and knowable, and that therefore we are safe within it. Just as important, it makes us feel informed, intelligent, and powerful. When we are certain, we are lords of our maps: the outer limits of our knowledge and the outer limits of the world are one and the same.
Seen in this light, our dislike of doubt is a kind of emotional agoraphobia. Uncertainty leaves us stranded in a universe that is too big, too open, too ill-defined. Even Voltaire, the one who dismissed certainty as absurd, acknowledged in the same breath that doubt is “uncomfortable.” The word is understated yet oddly precise: the open space of doubt leaves us ill at ease, unable to relax or feel secure. Where certainty reassures us with answers, doubt confronts us with questions, not only about our future but also about our past: about the decisions we made, the beliefs we held, the people and groups to whom we offered our allegiance, the very way we lived our lives. To make matters worse, facing our own private uncertainty can also compel us to face the existence of uncertainty in general—the unconsoling fact that nothing in the world can be perfectly known by any mere mortal, and that therefore we can’t shield ourselves and our loved ones from error, accident, and disaster.
No wonder we gravitate toward certainty instead. It’s not that we are oblivious to its intellectual and moral dangers; it’s that those dangers seem pretty abstract when compared with the immediate practical, emotional, and existential perils of doubt. In fact, just as our love of being right is best understood as a fear of being wrong, our attraction to certainty is best understood as an aversion to uncertainty. To explore that aversion, I want to turn now to three representatives of the domain of chronic doubt: Hamlet, the famously indecisive prince of the Danes; John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who rescued the term “waffle” from the breakfast table; and that most baffling and maddening figure of modern American politics, the Undecided Voter.
Appropriately enough, the world’s most famous play about doubt opens with a question. The setting is Denmark, the time is shortly after the death of the king (Hamlet’s father) and the question that reverberates across the stage manages to be at once banal and chilling: “Who’s there?” Who is there, is among others, the dead king’s ghost, who wants to have one last talk with his son. When