Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz argues that Western culture has the psychology of error almost entirely backwards: we treat being wrong as rare, embarrassing, and a sign of moral or intellectual failure, when in fact it is a constant, structural feature of how minds work. Because we can never experience being wrong in the present tense — the moment we recognize an error, we've already stopped believing it — we live in a kind of permanent blind spot about our own current mistakes, feeling certain about beliefs that will later turn out to be false. Schulz traces how faulty senses, motivated reasoning, social pressure, and a hunger for certainty conspire to produce error, then follows the emotional arc of what happens when a cherished belief collapses, from denial through heartbreak to, sometimes, genuine transformation.

The stakes go well beyond academic curiosity: Schulz shows how our discomfort with error corrodes relationships, fuels ideological rigidity, and makes people defend indefensible positions rather than admit fault. If error were treated as ordinary and expected rather than shameful, she argues, people could catch mistakes earlier, update beliefs faster, and treat disagreement with more curiosity and less defensiveness — a case that lands differently, and more urgently, in an era of polarized certainty than it did on publication.

Who should read it

Anyone who has struggled to admit a mistake, or who wants to understand why other people cling so stubbornly to beliefs that seem obviously wrong, will find a useful framework here. It's a natural read for people interested in cognitive bias, decision-making, or the psychology of belief revision.

About the author

Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing; Being Wrong was her first book.