Kathryn Schulz On Learning To Love 'Being Wrong'

Once upon a time, everybody knew the sun revolved around the Earth -- until we realized it didn't.

From the celestial mechanics, to the best way to avoid traffic, there are a bunch of things that everyone believes right now that are just plain wrong. And while it's hard to admit we got it wrong, Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong, argues that it's time to embrace our errors.

After all, she says, making errors is inevitable.

"The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number," Schulz tells NPR's Neal Conan.

But being wrong can be unsettling, even scary. At the heart of why we hate being wrong, Schulz says, is that "we're terrified of feeling out of control. We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know."

And when we finally realize we're wrong, Schulz says, "we want to fall into a hole in the ground or we want to disappear. We want to die."

Sure, it's dramatic. But, Schulz says, "We often feel that really intense wave of kind of shame and horror that we made this mistake." So she recommends not just accepting our mistakes, but embracing them.

"Stop pretending that we can sort of imagine it out of existence," she advises.

After all, without mistakes, she says, "we wouldn't be human."

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