Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [97]
These belief investments can be very light—the sliver of ego we stake on a friendly bet—or they can be the figurative equivalent of our life’s savings. Take Anita Wilson’s one-time belief in the literal truth of the Bible. Just for starters, her sunk costs included her trust in her parents, her standing in and connections to her community, her public identity, her private sense of self, and, arguably, twenty years of her life. That’s a formidable list, and we haven’t even gotten to innumerable ancillary beliefs (such as the merits of evolutionary theory and the morality of abortion), or to not-so-ancillary ideas about the nature and meaning of life. Does the world and everything in it exist for a divine purpose? Is a loving God watching over me? Will I be saved on Judgment Day? Will there be a Judgment Day? Fundamentally: am I, in the biggest of big pictures, safe, smart, worthy, righteous, right? To have a belief that answers all these questions is to be sunk into it at a psychological cost considerably beyond calculation.
The problem is that, as with the feeling of rightness, our investment in a belief (or conversely, our indifference to it) has no necessary relationship to its truth. No amount of sunk costs can make an erroneous belief accurate, just as fixing the flat on a junky car can’t make it un-junky. But our sunk costs do have a keen relationship to our loyalty. The more we spend on a belief, the harder it is to extricate ourselves from it. As Anita put it, “there’s a continuum of things you can be wrong about, and some of them are bearable, and some of them are not. I can’t really accept the possibility that I’m wrong about hell now. But you know, in part that’s because if I’m wrong about that one, I’m fucked.”
This brings us back to the main point: given the power of sunk costs and our capacity to ignore negative feedback about our beliefs, it’s a wonder any of us ever manages to acknowledge that we were wrong. That we sometimes do so is a testament to the human mind—but to what part of it is anybody’s guess. If it is hard to isolate the moment of pure error, it is even harder to isolate what’s going on inside us when we do or don’t face up to our mistakes. We can surmise from our own experience, however, that it has a lot to do with context. Or rather, with contexts: with what is going on both around us and within us.
What’s going on around us comes down to two questions. The first is how much we are sheltered from or exposed to challenges to our beliefs. When we claim that people who disagree with us “live in a bubble,” we mean that their environment is not forcing them (or enabling them) to face the flaws in their beliefs. The second is whether the people around us make it easy or hard to accept our errors. The cult members studied by Leon Festinger faced public ridicule when their prophecies (some of which had been printed in the local newspaper) failed to come true. As Festinger pointed out, that ridicule was not merely mean-spirited but also, as we saw with the Swiss antisuffragists, counterproductive. “The jeering of nonbelievers,” he wrote, “simply makes it far more difficult for the adherents to withdraw from the movement and admit that they were wrong.” However much we might enjoy crowing at other people’s errors, it gives those people little reason to change their minds and consider sharing our beliefs instead.*
If the workings of this outer context are relatively straightforward, the workings of the inner one are hopelessly complex. Like all dynamic systems, our inner universes are governed by a kind of chaos theory: sensitive in unpredictable ways to minor fluctuations, easily perturbed, oftentimes seemingly random. In such a system, it’s hard to explain why humility and humor sometimes win out over pride and touchiness, and even tougher to predict the outcome in advance. As a consequence, our ability to own up to our mistakes will always