Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

The author introduces a woman she calls Hannah, who, in 1992, underwent a neurological exam in a hospital in Vienna, Austria. She had suffered a stroke one month earlier, which damaged the near entirety of her visual cortex. When the neurologist began asking Hannah to describe objects around the room, Hannah answered the doctor with confidence. However, Hannah was actually blind but did not know it. This condition is called Anton’s Syndrome, and neurologists suspect that it takes place when the brain mistakes an idea in the mind for a feature that exists in the real world. This phenomenon—whereby the brain essentially invents things without the person’s conscious awareness—is known as “confabulation.” This, the author says, reveals that error has no limits and that all forms of knowledge can ultimately fail us.

Confabulation also occurs in split-brain patients—those whose epileptic seizures are so severe that their brain hemispheres must be surgically separated. When these patients are strategically shown images (images that give the patient a command) on a specific side of their visual field, they respond differently, respective to the side; When images are displayed on the side of the patient’s visual field that is processed by the brain’s right-side hemisphere—which is minimally linguistic—the patient follows the commands. However, when asked to explain why they carried out the behavior, the patient must use the left side of the brain—which is heavily linguistic and involved in crafting narratives—and this hemisphere is unable to communicate with the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere thus makes something up. In other words, the right hemisphere can’t explain to the left hemisphere what was happening, and because the left hemisphere doesn’t have the appropriate information, it confabulates a reason, or narrative, for the patient’s behavior.

The author then turns to memory failure as another example of human fallibility, explaining how the flashbulb memory theory—which holds that we can remember surprising and traumatizing events much more accurately than more mundane ones—was invalidated. In fact, such memories’ accuracy degrades at the same rate as commonplace recollections, and the degradation is so predictable that it is plottable on a graph: the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting.

Schulz states that while no one is able to capture their memories with perfect detail, we are confident in their accuracy and have “a strong feeling of knowing” that fills us with a conviction of rightness (73). However, as Schulz contends, this recording-technology model of memory—in which the sharpness of the inner picture reflects a memory’s accuracy—is incorrect. Contemporary scientists tend to agree that memory is not a singular function and instead includes multiple processes, such as recalling people, facts, times, and places. Furthermore, these processes are accomplished by several neuroanatomical structures whose purposes range from recognizing faces to emotional processing. Since we are unable to sense or witness our minds reconstructing our memories, we have the same problem as with perception, whereby we cannot experience the process and thus cannot feel where distortions and errors take place.

Schulz’s point is that “we are bad at knowing we don’t know,” and we are quicker to generate theories than we are to admit to or register our own ignorance (82). If, as human tendency indicates, we are to accept our fallibility, then knowledge should be discarded in place of belief—because belief, the author explains, is what we use to navigate the world.

Chapter 5 introduces Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, and the issues surrounding the 2008 financial crisis. Greenspan was criticized about the Federal Reserve’s responsibility to stop the lending practices that helped exacerbate the crisis, which reflects how his global model of economics failed. This presented a major ideological crisis for those involved in understanding and directing the economy. The problem, says Schulz, was Greenspan’s unwavering belief that the markets could regulate themselves.

The author uses this example to demonstrate that our self-created models of the world are not knowledge, but beliefs—and beliefs can fail us. Belief, she says, is “inextricable from our identities” (95), which is the reason being wrong can be so jarring to our sense of self.

Schulz explains that the reason we have grown so adept at creating theories that reflect our beliefs is that we must be able to adapt and respond to what is happening in our environment. Evidence even suggests that babies as young as seven months old already theorize about fundamental physical properties. Theorizing, she argues, enables us to discover and speculate about what is hidden from us, including what goes on in others’ minds.

Naïve realism is the notion that our beliefs, instead of being constructed, actually reflect the truth. The author uses children under the age of five as an example of individuals whose beliefs about the world do not deviate from the world as it truly is. However, as Schulz contends, the world is filled with things we are unable to directly experience—such as the structure of molecules, the infrared spectrum, and other dimensions. Developmental psychologists have come to acknowledge that as children get older, they form a representational theory of mind, which holds that the mind makes sense of the world through idiosyncratic means. As such, these children eventually learn: Beliefs about the world can diverge from the world as it is, others’ beliefs can diverge from yours, others lack certain knowledge you may have, and you might lack information that others possess.

The author goes on to present the “’Cuz It’s True Constraint” to explain why we act like our beliefs are infallible (104). The principle’s basic tenet is that we have our convictions due to our belief that those convictions are supported by facts: “I must believe that I believe it ’cuz it’s true” (105). This constraint’s primary stipulation is that it only applies to our own beliefs, not to those of others, as we easily and quickly see self-serving and biased motivations in other people’s beliefs. We, on the other hand, downplay or ignore the self-serving facets of our own convictions, which is what psychologists call the “bias blind spot.” Due to this phenomenon, we can see into our own minds but not into anyone else’s.

This phenomenon also spurs the “Ignorance Assumption,” in which we believe that our convictions are based on facts while those who disagree with us simply lack the correct information. The “bias blind spot” phenomenon also results in the “Idiocy Assumption,” where we believe that those opposing us have the facts but lack comprehension. Finally, this phenomenon produces the “Evil Assumption,” which assumes that people have and understand the facts but willfully ignore them.

Thus, we are hasty to ascribe to our own stories infallible accuracy and dismiss those who disagree with us, making it difficult to accept our own fallibility. Assuming that others are wrong due to their intellectual or moral shortcoming makes us unwilling to confront our own capacity for error.

Chapter 6 opens with a discussion on how evidence informs our theories. The author asserts that we tend to believe things based on meager evidence, but she also states that this tendency represents the drive behind the machinery of human cognition. This is because the human mind cares less about what is logically valid or theoretically possible; rather, we tend to care more about what is probable based on our previous experiences. We take the things we have and have not experienced in comparable situations as evidence, which is known as “inductive reasoning.” Psychologists and neuroscientists have increasingly come to agree that inductive reasoning—be it conscious or unconscious—underlies all human cognition.

Inductive reasoning enables vast assumptions based on limited evidence. However, while inductive reasoning teaches us about the way the world operates—such as categorizing and the cause-effect relationship—our conclusions from this reasoning are only probabilistic, meaning they are fallible. Being both a successful and imperfect method, inductive reasoning is a process whereby what “makes us right is what makes us wrong” (122).

Although it makes us fast and efficient thinkers, inductive reasoning creates a bias in that it causes us to leap to conclusions that are sometimes incorrect. Another bias this process creates is the “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency to put more stock in evidence that confirms our beliefs. We thus assess evidence based on the theories we have already formed on the basis of earlier evidence. Finally, the “No True Scotsman” fallacy is another cognitive bias, whereby we decide counterevidence has no weight in considering the validity of our beliefs.

Highlighting the importance of developing theories prior to having evidence, the author mentions historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that doing science without a preexisting theory is impossible. Without such preexisting belief systems, Kuhn argues, we would not know which questions to ask or how to make sense of the answers we obtain. Science, says Schulz, is riddled with examples of how theories have led people to evidence, rather than evidence leading to theories.

Schulz concludes that we must learn to combat our inductive biases by deliberately seeking evidence that contradicts our beliefs and by taking such evidence seriously when we encounter it.