Book SummaryBeing Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Being Wrong

Right now, at this very moment, you’re wrong. What you’re wrong about could be anything, from something as trivial as where you left your keys to something life-defining, such as a deeply held belief. Nevertheless, it’s doubtful you can come up with a list of things you’re wrong about off the top of your head. After all, it’s belief in our ideas that allows us to function, regardless of whether we’re wrong or right. In Being Wrong, published in 2010, Kathryn Schulz argues that making mistakes is an essential part of human nature and that it shouldn’t necessarily be our goal to eliminate every bit of error from our lives.

Instead, Schulz writes that we should change how we view mistakes so that we can leverage our common human foibles to help us learn, explore the world around us, and maybe even laugh at ourselves once in a while.

Schulz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose work has covered a range of topics including immigration, civil...

Being Wrong Summary Why Be Wrong?

The idea that being wrong about something can be good goes against what most of us are brought up to believe. We’re told that making mistakes is “only human,” but we’re also taught that making mistakes is a sign that we’re stupid or have low moral standing. This is wrong, Schulz argues. She says that what’s important is that we accept and learn from our mistakes, because usually our mistakes don’t hurt us as much as reacting to them poorly does. We’ll begin by looking at how we define right and wrong and why clinging to our beliefs is a valid survival trait that nevertheless robs us of a healthy approach to error, even when those mistakes can enrich our lives.

Schulz doesn’t define right and wrong in terms of “truth,” instead focusing on the experience of changing your mind from one idea to another. This is because the traditional definition of “being wrong”—that you believe something is true when it isn’t—implies that there’s an underlying “truth” that every belief can be judged against. While this may apply to some situations, like misremembering where you left your keys, it doesn’t hold for all situations, such as matters of personal taste or opinion. In these...

Being Wrong Summary What It’s Like to Be Wrong

It’s easier to consider the pros and cons of being wrong on an intellectual level than it is to truly experience being wrong. This is because of what’s known as “error blindness”—our inability to see our own mistakes in the moment. How we react to discovering we’re wrong depends on how much our thinking has to change and whether that change will be pleasant or unpleasant.

There are two distinct reactions you can have to finding out that you’re wrong about something. The first is revulsion—immediately after making a mistake, such as calling a friend by someone else’s name, you might say, “I feel sick,” “I want to throw up,” or even “shoot me now,” all of which are expressions of pain and the desire to end it quickly. But Schulz says this isn’t our only mode of feeling—in addition to the pain of certain types of error, we also feel elation at a happy surprise, such as when you run into a friend you hadn’t expected to see for a while. Both types of error, both pleasant and painful, define how we feel about being wrong, though we tend to feel the negative more often than the positive.

The Right Words Shape Your Reactions

Schulz uses people’s common word choices to...

Being Wrong Summary Why You’re Wrong

The fact that human error is practically a given implies that there’s something fundamentally wrong with how human beings perceive the world. That would be true if the purpose of the brain was to perfectly analyze information from your senses, but it’s not. Instead, the brain is optimized to make judgments quickly from limited data and choose the best behavior to promote our survival. As a result, our minds are built on heuristics—mental shortcuts to efficient, best-guess thinking based on limited information, mental models, and the collective judgment of whatever groups we’re a part of. According to Schulz, these tools make our minds amazingly efficient, but they’re also the loopholes through which we make mistakes.

Perception and Reason

The most basic and natural mistake that we make is to trust the evidence of our senses without question. The senses are the mind’s only window on the world, but we underestimate the degree to which that window is clouded by how the brain filters data through an unconscious interpretive process, followed by instinctive reasoning that doesn’t rely on strict rules of logic.

Schulz explains that our conscious minds don’t receive the...

Being Wrong Summary How to Cope With Being Wrong

We’ve all felt the pain of making small mistakes—acknowledging the big ones throws us into turmoil. If you find out you’ve been wrong on a major level, especially about a core belief that part of your worldview hinges upon, it can trigger a full-blown existential crisis. As with grief, there are stages you’ll inevitably go through, including gauging the scope of how wrong you’ve been, denying your error or perhaps defending it, before hopefully accepting that you were wrong and finding a way to grow in response.

Schulz says that when you learn you’ve been wrong, your first question will be to ask, “By how much?” Determining the scale of how wrong you are determines how many of your beliefs you’ll have to change, and how truthfully you can answer that question depends on how well you can take the emotional punch of admitting your mistakes. Your initial response will also include a measure of denial as a defense mechanism. Short-term denial isn’t necessarily bad. It can give you enough emotional breathing room to face up to your mistake once the initial shock has passed. Long-term denial is a different story. Instead of healthy growth, it’s rooted in deceit—lying to others and...

Shortform Exercise: How Well Do You Handle Being Wrong?

Schulz writes that being wrong and making mistakes is something that, as fallible humans, all of us will experience in our lives. No doubt you can remember mistakes in your past, but it’s also unavoidable that something you believe at this moment isn’t true. Consider, for a moment, how you normally react to finding out (or being told) that you’re wrong and whether you think there’s a way to react better.

Think of an error in judgment you’ve made at some point in your life. What did it feel like when you learned of your mistake? What was your initial reaction, and has your perspective on it changed over time?