Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [98]
But if our attitude toward error is sometimes a product of the time of day, it is also a product of our time of life. Acknowledging our mistakes is an intellectual and (especially) an emotional skill, and as such it evolves in tandem with our cognitive and psychological development. For instance, the intolerance we routinely impute to adolescents and the wisdom we often ascribe to the elderly are, in part, reflections of different developmental stages in our relationship to wrongness. The hallmark of teenagers is that they think they know everything, and are therefore happy to point out other people’s errors—but woe betide the adult who tries to suggest that the kids could be wrong. (These teenage tendencies can help as well as hinder the process of belief change. When I asked Anita Wilson how she had been able to change her mind about something as fundamental as her faith, she said that it was partly about age: “The one thing I had going for me was that I was still basically a teenager, so disagreeing with my parents was natural.”)†
By contrast, the wisdom we perceive in the elderly often stems from their hard-earned knowledge that no one knows everything. In the long haul, they recognize, all of us screw up, misunderstand ideas, misjudge situations, underestimate other people, overestimate ourselves—and all of this over and over again. In this respect, their sagacity is a form of humility, one that enables a less rigid relationship to the world. (Sadly, the developmental curve sometimes comes full circle. The other cliché about old age, that it makes people cantankerous and set in their ways, is also a product of cognitive development—or rather, of cognitive degeneration. Thus the elderly can sometimes come to seem a lot like adolescents: hawklike in their keenness for other people’s shortcomings, steadfast in defense of their own rightness.)
Our capacity to acknowledge error, then, has something to do with where we are in life, both immediately and overall. But it has nearly everything to do with who we are in life. It would be easy to observe that people who are arrogant, obstinate, and close minded have difficulty admitting error, whereas those who are more humble, curious, and open to change fare better. But there’s something unsatisfying about this. For one thing, as I’ve already noted, all of us contain an admixture of these elements. For another, this explanation verges on the circular: saying that people who are stubborn and narrow-minded can’t admit to being wrong sounds a lot like saying that people who can’t admit to being wrong can’t admit to being wrong. It’s true enough, but it doesn’t tell us why each of us feels about error the particular way we do.
A better answer was suggested by Irna Gadd, a psychoanalyst in New York. “Our capacity to tolerate error,” Gadd said, “depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion.” Most of our mistakes are nowhere near as emotionally leveling as the pure wrongness experienced by Anita Wilson, but virtually all of them require us to feel something: a wash of dismay, a moment of foolishness, guilt over our dismissive treatment of someone else who turned out to be right—I could go on. (And I will in the next chapters, where we’ll look more closely at the range of emotions that wrongness can provoke.) It is the presentiment of these feelings, and the recoil from them, that renders us so defensive in the face of possible error. In this respect, the experience of pure wrongness, although rare, is the telling one: our resistance to error is, in no small part, a resistance to being left alone with too few certainties and too many emotions.
For some people, this experience is essentially unbearable. When I spoke with Anita Wilson, I asked whether her parents (with whom she remains close) had questioned their faith at all after she renounced it. “Quietly, behind the scenes, my mom can bend a little,” she told me. “But my father is more rigid. He once said to me, ‘If I don’t believe that every word