The Shame of Being Wrong Is Lying to You

How credibility really works.

(Audio version here)

I recently got into a couple of rather ridiculous arguments. One was with a man who had made a claim about crime statistics that could easily be demonstrated to be false. The other was with a woman who had made a rather indefensible statement in support of vicious verbal abuse of people for holding beliefs she strongly disapproved of.

The man who had made the false statement about crime statistics was, I think, honestly mistaken and had believed it to be true. But the way he engaged with evidence was anything but honest. He first insisted that his claim was correct and statistics had been manipulated for political reasons or were revealed to be misleading on closer analysis while declining to show any example of this. He then argued that statistics were irrelevant anyway and the point is that his ‘lived experience’ of danger mattered and should be respected.

I suspect the woman of having misspoken in haste while having strong feelings and that she did not really support the horrible abuse under discussion. Rather than saying so when challenged on this, she responded by moving all manner of goalposts and engaging in a wide range of fallacious reasoning. She defended her own right to object to the beliefs and pointed out abusive behaviour on the ‘other side’ - neither of which anybody had denied. She declared the abuse to be a very rare occurrence and not worth worrying about. She also assigned dubious motivations to anybody who thought it was worth addressing. None of this provided any ethical justification for the abusive behaviour originally claimed to be justified.

I relate these anecdotes, not as yet another complaint about people being wrong on the internet, but as good examples of the unhelpful way we humans typically react to realising we have been wrong either factually or ethically. In both of these cases, there was good reason to think the individuals recognised that their initial statement had been either a mistake (in the case of the man) or affirmed an ethical stance she did not truly support (in the case of the woman). Rather than acknowledge it, both doubled down defensively on their wrongness and undermined their own credibility, including with people who shared their political views and concerns. Why do we - of course, I include myself - so often feel compelled to do this?

Humans hate being wrong. We really, really hate it. On realising that we have been wrong in public, we typically feel an immediate spike of adrenaline as though we are in danger accompanied by a hot surge of shame and embarrassment. Our first instinct is likely to be to immediately seek a way out of having been wrong, to find a way to be right after all or to cover up the wrongness. But why? Error is a natural and inevitable part of being human. Everybody does it. We all know that everybody does it. We do not expect other people to be right about everything 100% of the time and yet we often react as though we think that we ourselves must be or there will be a terrible, indelible stain on our character.

Writers like Kathryn Schulz and Jonathan Haidt and Sara and Jack Gorman have examined this question through the lenses of evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience. In our evolutionary past, when our lives were both simpler and more hazardous on a daily basis, being wrong could be immediately dangerous. Consequently, humans have evolved a strong ‘theory drive’ by which to navigate their environment. As Schulz writes,

It’s easy to see why a theory drive would be evolutionarily advantageous. Imagine that you are your own earliest ancestor, trying to make your way in the world some 200,000 years ago. Somehow, you have to figure out that shaking a certain kind of tree will make edible fruit fall to the ground. You have to learn that berries of specific shapes and colors are nourishing, while other very similar berries can kill you. Upon hearing a rustling in the bushes, you have to be able to infer—pretty damn quickly—the presence of a predator, or of dinner. In other words, you must be extraordinarily adept at guessing what’s going on in your environment and why.

The importance of this ability to theorise to our survival has resulted in a strong investment in being right. So deeply entrenched is this instinct that our brains react to disconfirming evidence as though to danger. Gorman and Gorman explain the neurological basis of this response,

If we initially get a feeling of reward from an idea, we will seek to replicate the feeling multiple times. Each time, the reward center in the brain, the ventral striatum and more specifically the nucleus accumbens located within it, is triggered, and eventually other parts of the instinctive brain learn to solidify the idea into a fixed one. If we try to change our minds, a fear center in the brain like the anterior insula warns us that the danger is imminent. The powerful dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can override these more primitive brain centers and assert reason and logic, but it is slow to act and requires a great deal of determination and effort to do so. Hence, it is fundamentally unnatural and uncomfortable to change our minds, and this is reflected in the way our brains work.

In addition to this, we are social mammals and possessing valuable knowledge of benefit to our group has contributed greatly to our status and our security within that group. This strongly motivates us to want to be seen to be right, either factually or morally. This drive can, unfortunately, lead us to value our reputations as somebody who believes the right things even more than genuinely being right. Jonathan Haidt describes this as our species having evolved reasoning that functions more like an ‘inner lawyer’ concerned with protecting our reputations rather than an ‘inner scientist’ concerned with establishing what is true. He writes,

Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.

Our ability to theorise about what is going on in our environments remains essential to our safety, of course. Equally, maintaining a good reputation among our peers remains vital to our psychological wellbeing as social animals. As Iago says to Othello,

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

We very much need people to want to know things and want to be right about what they know and also to think socially and care about the opinions of others. However, our horror of being wrong and the lengths we will go to in order to appear not to be wrong - even when we are - often undermines us in today’s complex societies, especially in political and cultural debates. Furthermore, I would argue that our feeling of horror at being wrong and the sensation of shame that accompanies it in such situations are lying to us about the reality of the perceptions of others!

In reality, acknowledging being wrong does not damage our reputation. On the contrary, it improves it among the people we respect and whom we wish to respect us.

Imagine a situation in which someone you respect writes or says something and is then shown to be wrong by someone else. They respond indignantly and defensively. They double down on their original claim, insisting on their own rightness despite the convincing counterpoint. They reframe what they said in the first place so the counterpoint does not refute it or use fallacious arguments to try to get to the same point a different way. Are you convinced and reassured by this or do you feel disappointed? Is your confidence in that person’s judgement as high as it was before or has it been somewhat shaken? Will you be as likely to cite them in future, confident that they will have checked their sources, sought constructive criticism and acted upon it?

Now imagine that instead of doing that, the individual responds to the correction publicly saying, “X has shown I was in error on this point. Thank you for pointing this out, X.” Do you feel disillusioned to discover that your admired person can, on occasion, be mistaken or make an error in their reasoning? Or does your respect and admiration for them grow as a result of their willingness to self-correct rather than let their ego get in the way? Do you feel warmly towards them for their gracious acknowledgement of the person who pointed out the error? Will you trust their judgement even more now, feeling more confident of their future reliability?

Unless you are somebody who cares very little for what is true or well-reasoned and/or your respect for others depends on their affirmations of a particular narrative regardless of whether it is true or ethically consistent, it is likely that you will instinctively warm to the person acknowledging error and they will rise in your estimation. We respect people like this and want to be respected by them. This is a sign of strength and integrity and it inspires trust and admiration. We ourselves would like to be seen as a person with strength and integrity whom others trust and admire. Yet, when it comes to ourselves, we are prone to feeling a sense of danger, a flood of shame, and instinctively to look for a way out of being wrong.

There’s a disconnection between our instinctive reaction and the reality of how others are likely to perceive us when we honestly admit a mistake. I believe this needs to be consciously overridden. The solution is to acknowledge that feeling of shame and embarrassment, grit our teeth, act with honesty and grace and then see that nothing terrible happens. We are not cast out of our social or intellectual circles and we do not fall in the estimation of those whose respect means something to us. Rewire the reaction from “Oh no! I was wrong. This is awful. How can I manoeuvre things so I do not appear to be wrong after all and people won’t despise me?” to “It seems I was wrong. This is an opportunity to self-correct and be less wrong and people will appreciate the correction and respect me for making it.” As this latter prediction is confirmed in reality, the feelings of shame and horror at being wrong will diminish and this will become a habitual response which is good both for one’s own psychological wellbeing and for the state of public discourse.

I recall three occasions of being publicly wrong and having to battle the negative feelings associated with that, grit my teeth and self-correct. On all three occasions, the results of this were positive.

I once claimed that it must be almost impossible to maintain racist beliefs about the inferiority of black people if one has in one’s life black people whom one loves and respects. This was responded to by several people I respect pointing out that humans frequently engage in compartmentalisation in which they “make an exception” for a certain individual while continuing to hold a negative generalisation about a group and manage the cognitive dissonance. It would be very unlikely, they pointed out, if racism were the one area in which people did not do this. Some added personal anecdotes in which people did precisely this. I conceded that this is indeed something humans do and that I clearly had not thought that through properly and now saw that it was wrong. The people I respected who had pointed out the flaw in my reasoning continued to respect me.

I once said that I thought the claim that some parents would rather their children be trans than gay or lesbian and encouraged them to understand themselves that way was nonsense and that people who objected to homosexuality were even more likely to object to trans identity. A gender critical feminist who had previously been antagonistic towards me and inclined to assign negative motivations to me responded by sending me many accounts of American Christian parents saying they felt precisely this way because homosexuality was a sin while a mismatched gender identity was a disorder and not sinful. I quote-tweeted her thread saying that I now realised I had been mistaken about this and this really does happen and is a cause for concern. She was inclined to be suspicious of this at first but on being assured that I was perfectly sincere, had held my previous position because I had not encountered this before but had changed my mind on the basis of the evidence she had provided, she softened towards me. She now regards me much more positively as a good faith actor with whom she has some disagreements and is also inclined to try to find common ground with me and meet me halfway when we find ourselves to differ.

I once said, as part of a longer thread about gender roles in the late medieval period, that peasants were frequently conscripted into wars. A medieval military historian responded that this is a myth that grew up very recently and that occupational roles were much more strictly segregated and this almost never happened. This felt particularly embarrassing to me as this is my period of study and I spent some time verifying that he was, in fact, correct, rather hoping that he was not. He was and I thanked him for this and corrected myself. He responded graciously that it is a common error made by medievalists in different areas and said he found my thread very interesting and illuminating of things he had not encountered. Should I ever find my way back into this area of study and he ever needs to reference religious writing for context, it is likely that he will regard me as a credible source precisely because I responded well to his correction.

Absolutely nothing bad happened as a result of acknowledging my errors. On the contrary, people who had previously respected me did so even more because I had heard them, considered their point and corrected myself, people inclined to be antagonistic towards me ceased being so and more productive, collaborative discussions ensued and my scholarly credibility increased in the eyes of a more senior academic who expressed appreciation and humility in return.

We humans have evolved to theorise about how the world works and become attached to those theories to the extent that we can experience being wrong as though it were dangerous to our survival even when it is not. We are also inclined to feel that our reputations and our security within a group are dependent on never being seen to err. Consequently, we have developed a sophisticated ‘inner lawyer’ to manipulate and reframe error to make it appear like nothing of the sort. However, we have also evolved to value honesty, humility and integrity as the genuine hallmarks of a trustworthy individual and to be very alert to deception, insincerity and self-aggrandisement as behaviours that are hazardous to our safety. We are a very complicated species! As evolutionary psychologists, Patrick McNamara and David Trumble put it,

In evolutionary terms, every time a population of individuals became good at detecting these liars, the liars became better at concealing their lies… a never-ending arms race.

We may well feel, in the moment of realising we were wrong, the urge to go into damage-control mode and double down, dissemble, fudge, reframe the error, impugn the motivations of our critics, but we are doing so to members of a species wired to spot this and not respect it! We cannot genuinely redeem our reputations by giving in to this instinct. We can only harm them. The horror and shame we feel at realising ourselves to be wrong is absolutely natural but it also lies to us. It tells us that our reputations, our status, our security within our group are at stake if we do not conceal our mistakes. In reality, all of those can only improve if we show the strength and integrity to self-correct.