We need to be better at being wrong

By Adam Murphy

Nobody enjoys being wrong. To be more accurate, no one enjoys being seen as wrong. It’s embarrassing to be confident in something and then realise you were defending something clearly untrue. But how far does this go? Is our love to fit in so strong that we will lie about our opinion, even if we know we are correct? And how does this aspect of ourselves shape the society we live in? 

There are a plethora of examples to choose from when discussing conformity in society. The echo chambers on social media, where people only seek out those who agree with them. Discourse over fashion trends and ideas of masculinity and femininity. These are all things that exist because of our need to fit in. There are of course people who break this mold, who start the trends and can be content with the possibility of being controversial, but these are the minority. For most people it is easier to follow the crowd. A nice example of this is the Asch conformity experiments, where people are set up in groups and vote on what line in a series of pictures is longer. Actors are placed within the groups and intentionally get the answers wrong, even when they are obvious, to make the testees less certain of their own ideas. Usually about 1 in 3 people will give an answer they know to be wrong just because everyone before them gave the same one. For something as black and white as this to have such a large effect, it begs the question of the effect it would have on topics with more ambiguity.  

This effect is most pronounced on people who are neutral to a certain topic. Being given an opinion in line with the masses is much easier to agree with when you don’t really care either way. This is also why first impressions are so important. If I start off neutral to something and then my opinion changes to be negative, turning it back to positive will be much harder than if I had been given the information in the reverse order. This is because I would have to internally admit that my viewpoint was wrong and this is not  something that comes naturally.  It's a classic ‘Us vs Them’ situation. The first piece of info you gain will convince you of one thing, making you part of the group. ‘Us,’ who believe this versus ‘Them,’ who disagree. Converting to ‘Them’ is tough because you hold an inherently negative idea of ‘Them’ by default. It goes without saying though, that just because it’s the first piece of information you gain, it does not mean it is the best. This is something we all have to work on, to learn to be wrong, because often we assume that we have the whole picture when we may only have one side of the story. The idea of unknown unknowns is pertinent, we cannot know what information we don’t have and so it is very easy to make conclusions based on what you do have.  

What is equally as important as learning to be wrong though, is learning to be right. When discussions were raised about the origin of life in the 1700s, each side had their opinion and believed the other to be foolish. They made experiments to prove both sides and critiqued the others as flawed. John Needham believed that life arose spontaneously from organic matter while Lazzara Spallazani believed life could only come from other life. Both had experiments to prove it but when it was decided that Spallazani was right, people jumped to the assumption that Needham had been blinded by bias. Furthermore, that he had performed poor experiments and simply did not have proper equipment, leading him to the wrong conclusion. In reality, the unknown unknowns were the cause; bacterial endospores that could survive being boiled were in Needham's experiments. Since no one knew these existed, when he ran the same experiment as Spallazani he saw life show up, a completely reasonable conclusion then is that it arose spontaneously. Spallazani was lucky that he had no endospores and got a different result. Neither had better or worse equipment, experiments, or biases. In fact, Needham actually had slightly better equipment, yet they came to different conclusions. It is unfair to act as if Needham had done something wrong with his science. In another world, it would be him who was celebrated for disproving spontaneous generation. It was only much later on that endospores were discovered and the whole truth came to light. From this, it is clear that being right does not mean you have triumphed over those who are wrong, you have not proved your superiority. Humility and respect are more important than being “better,” and any acting as such will only dissuade others from having an open mind in future–for humiliation is a strong negative reinforcement. The truth is something you work towards with others, not something to wield as a weapon over them. 

Almost all of us live under the assumption that our beliefs are correct. Otherwise, we would change them, right? But often we do not want our beliefs challenged. We want to convince others and not be convinced ourselves. This defensiveness is an issue and we should change our opinion based on new information, but it can be easier to ignore or not truly interact with the information in order to maintain our current worldview. Realistically, we are all wrong about many things. We do not know what we are wrong about and so when faced with new information we should embrace the possibility of being wrong. 

When I was in primary school I was the student who would be mad getting 18 out of 20 in the Friday test. I held myself to a standard above everyone else and thus saw myself as above them, believing my own ideas to be better without consideration of the contrary. Thankfully I’ve learned since then that doing well in school means very little in the grand scheme of things. The truth is, if I really was as smart as I thought I was, I would have been happy to learn something new, to change my view based on new facts, and to separate my self worth from how others perceive me and my opinions. 

We need to be better at being wrong. We need to interact with others with a willingness to have our views challenged and potentially changed. Lying about your opinion to save face makes little sense unless the environment is hostile to you. Even then, they are hostile for the same reason; being unable to accept being wrong. Things like echo chambers, the increasingly polarised political climate, the hatred of ‘Them’ all come from a place of proud apathy to new ideas. Obviously this isn’t a single person problem, but we have to start with ourselves. Educated discourse is the greatest tool democracy has, we must use it as such.