I’m going to paint you all a picture, think back to elementary school or even middle school, on a weekday you wake up, get ready, eat some breakfast and head off to school. You get to school and everything is going fine until later that day one of your friends or someone you don’t even know points to you and says, “Hey I think your shirt’s on backwards, or I think your shirt is on inside out.” You panic. You immediately go to the restroom and properly wear your shirt cursing at yourself for doing something so silly and cursing at your parents for not telling you. This happens to everyone at least once in their life or something along the lines of this sort of situation. Making a mistake, being wrong is something nobody likes. We naturally feel this way; it is not a feeling that is pleasant to say the least.

As people, as human beings we know nobody is perfect everybody makes mistakes, sure, but if this is true why do we hate being wrong? If we hold this knowledge to be true in our minds then when a person does slip up and makes a mistake, the thoughts that enter our minds seem hypocritical. For example: “Oh why did Kennedy send those troops to Cuba without a proper plan?” Many of us would think to ourselves, “If I was president I wouldn’t have let that happen.” “Why did BP leak tons and tons of oil into the ocean? They should’ve been more careful.” “Oh those naïve people in Baltimore rioting and solving nothing, can’t they see they’re not doing anything to solve the issue?” Although we say nobody is perfect, we go through life acting as if we are. We are in this state of mind acting like we know what is best. This is a problem we face as people individually and collectively.

To answer the question why people hate being wrong, we need to know why people love being right. This need to be right begins during a person’s early stages in life. Last year I helped out at my church’s summer school program where we have classes for elementary kids. I was an assistant for second grade and was grading this student’s paper alongside him and when I pointed out an error he had made on a problem, he quickly snatched it up and corrected it. Once I had finished grading it he smiled and sweetly asked me to give him a 100, even though he clearly made a mistake. His motivation to get a good grade could’ve been numerous things, but I believe that children are taught to be the best and to get the “A”, to not end up like the dimwit in class who acts up and always gets bad grades. Getting a bad grade is being a “dummy” as one of my students blatantly stated; not making any mistakes is how to prevent from being exactly that.

They learn to strive toward perfection. They learn to not make any mistakes. We feel we have to be right because being wrong means that there’s something wrong with us. Sure, people would say that this strong sense to be right gives us motivation and drive. It allowed all these technological and scientific advances, proving and disproving theories. Yes this may as well be true, but this need to be right turns from a simple motivator to a deadly obsession, it reveals itself to be our Achilles’ heel.

One of my favorite books I’ve read is called “Freakonomics”, which explores economics and the hidden incentives in people. The authors of this book go through a mountain of statistics to try to find a pattern between things. These same authors of this book started a podcast where people ask questions and the authors answer them and one of the questions was, “Why do people feel compelled to answer questions they don’t know the answer to?” One of the authors, Steven D. Levitt, is a founder of a consulting agency to assist different businesses and he responded, “What I’ve found in businesses is no one will ever admit not knowing the answer to a question...one of the most important things you learn as an MBA is how to pretend you know the answer to any question even though you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. And I’ve found it’s really one of the most destructive factors in business…”

Later on Levitt says that when he wants to run blind experiments on a company he is met with strong resistance, since the company believes, “why do you want to do an experiment to find out the answer when we already have the answer?” These companies believe without a doubt they are right and don’t even entertain the possibility they could be wrong. Even when we grow up, this sense of rightness is still something we obsess over. Being right means your confidence in your own knowledge and opinion reflect perfectly what is happening in reality. So what happens when someone disagrees with you?

As an author and journalist for the New York Times, Kathryn Schulz explores this terrible fear of being wrong and came up with 3 logical assumptions that we come up with when faced with someone who disagrees with you. First off we assume they are just ignorant, they don’t have the same knowledge or experience we do so they don’t know any better. Or the second assumption, they’re stupid and they have all the facts and have the same experience as we do but they don’t know how to put the facts together. Or the last assumption, they’re evil and they are bending the truth for their own secret agendas. This is a way for us as people to treat each other terribly and no way to live.

Trying to make everyone look at the world through your lens made up of your beliefs and things you hold to be true makes life very dull. If everyone views the world as you do it leaves no room for creativity or innovation even. In stories, TV shows, movies we love the plot twist, the surprise comeback of a character, the unexpected ending. This is what gives fiction life, being wrong is what we crave in these mediums of entertainment, but God forbid we be wrong in real life.

This feeling inside of being right, always being right leaves no room for error. We have no indicator inside ourselves to realize we are wrong until it is too late. It allows us to send Cuban-American troops to die for naught, it allows us to destroy the biodiversity and creates habitat destruction in the Gulf of Mexico, it allows us to create racial tension between groups of people. We think of ourselves as right, invincible to wrongness and this leads to so much hurt. When we don’t know the answer, if we are unsure, when we are unsure we have to find the courage to step outside of this sense of rightness that we have been taught so long to be. Saying you’re wrong or you really do not know may be the most right thing you can do.