Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [91]
When it comes to observing imperceptibly slow natural processes—flowers blooming, weather systems forming, stars moving across the sky—we rely on time-lapse photography. If we wanted to isolate the wrongness implicit in our own gradual changes, we would need a kind of internal equivalent to that—which, as it happens, we have. Unfortunately, it is called memory, and as we have seen, it is notoriously unreliable. Moreover, it is most unreliable precisely with respect to accurately recalling past beliefs. This effect is widely documented. For instance, in 1973, the psychologist Greg Markus asked over 3,000 people to rate their stances (along one of those seven-point “strongly disagree / strongly agree” scales) on a range of social issues, including affirmative action, the legalization of marijuana, and equal rights for women. A decade later, he asked these same people to assess their positions again—and also to recall how they had felt about the issues a decade earlier. Across the board, these “what I used to think” ratings far more closely reflected the subjects’ current beliefs than those they had actually held in 1973. Here, it wasn’t just the wrongness that disappeared from the process of belief change. It was the change itself.
This is the kind of revisionist political history that George Orwell described—and decried—in 1984. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, changing the facts and forecasts in old newspaper articles to bring them in line with present-day realities. These changes help create the illusion of absolute infallibility, which in turn helps maintain absolute power: Winston is a servant (and ultimately a victim) of a fascist state. Of course, the fact that our memories can serve the same function as a dystopian Ministry of Truth doesn’t mean that we are all protofascists. Unlike the deliberate distortions imagined by Orwell, our own constant revising of memory is largely unconscious, and usually innocuous. But as with the Records Department, our memories often serve the quasi-magical function of causing our mistakes to quietly disappear.
One person who has seen this happen is Philip Tetlock. Tetlock is a psychology professor and political scientist who has conducted longitudinal studies of the accuracy of political forecasts by so-called experts—academics, pundits, policy wonks, and the like. As a matter of course, Tetlock would get back in touch with his subjects after the events they had predicted did or did not come to pass. In doing so, he discovered that these experts systematically misremembered their forecasts, believing them to have been far more accurate than his records showed. This, Tetlock said, created “a methodological nuisance: it is hard to ask someone why they got it wrong when they think they got it right.” This could be said of the rest of us, too. In updating the past to accord with the present, we eliminate the necessity (and the possibility) of confronting our mistakes. If we think we’ve always believed what we believe right now, there is no friction, no change, no error, and above all no uncomfortably different past self to account for.
If gradual belief change protects us from the experience of error by attenuating it virtually out of existence, sudden belief change does the opposite: it condenses that experience almost to the vanishing point. In these abrupt belief changes, the revelation that we were wrong is simultaneously a revelation of a new truth. Here, our experience of error is like one of those particles in high-energy physics that is so short-lived and unstable that it flashes into and out of existence at virtually the same time. For the most part, physicists can detect the presence