Review by New York Times Review
What happens when our wrongness is exposed (and why it feels so good to be right). IN 1650, Oliver Cromwell asked the Church of Scotland to reconsider its decision to side with the royalists instead of him. "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." The church didn't think it possible, of course, so Oliver's army took Scotland. According to Kathryn Schulz, each of us is our very own Church of Scotland - often mistaken, oddly oblivious and typically immune to a good beseeching. "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" is an insightful and delightful discussion of the errors of our ways - why we make mistakes, why we don't know we are making them and what we do when recognition dawns. Schulz begins with a question that should puzzle us more than it does: Why do we love being right? After all, she writes, "unlike many of life's other delights - chocolate, surfing, kissing - it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts." Indeed, as she notes, "we can't enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything," including that which we'd rather be wrong about, like "the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend's relationship or the fact that at our spouse's insistence, we just spent 15 minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel." Schulz teases out answers to this question over two rather different halves of her book. In the first half, she conducts a scientific tour of everyday wrongness that includes optical illusions, memory failures, neurological deficits and irrational beliefs, describing how they arise, how they are perpetuated by those around us and why we find it so difficult to see them for what they are. Much of this territory will be familiar to readers of such recent popular psychology titles as "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" or "The Invisible Gorilla." Although Schulz, a journalist, covers this material less expertly than the experts, she compensates by drawing on a wider pool of informants, from Wittgenstein to Hamlet to Alan Greenspan. By the end of the tour, we have a pretty good sense of why we see what isn't there, believe what isn't true and remember what didn't happen. Schulz then shifts from origins to experience - from "how our senses, our minds and our allegiances can all lead us into error" to "how we react when our convictions collapse out from under us, and how we are changed by that experience." This shift in perspective is accompanied by a sudden shift in form that compels Schulz to pop out of her narrative after 249 pages and discuss her plan with the reader. Hearing no objections, she offers several chapters that tell personal stories in classic New Yorker style ("On April 4, 1968, the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Claiborne Paul Ellis threw a party"). Case histories of a Klansman who became an unlikely advocate for civil rights, of a doomsday prophet whose apocalypse wasn't now, of a sexual assault victim whose mistaken testimony jailed an innocent man allow Schulz to explore what happens to us when our wrongness is exposed and we must accept it, deny it or be transformed by it. The stories are mainly gripping and always well told, though sometimes more powerful than the points they are meant to illuminate. FROM the expository first half through the character-driven second, Schulz remains good company - a warm, witty and welcome presence who confides in her readers rather than lecturing them. It doesn't hurt that she combines lucid prose with perfect comic timing: "Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say 'I told you so.' The brilliance of this phrase . . . derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right - at any rate, really, extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it." Schulz is not just a quotable writer; she is also a canny and original observer adept at pointing out things that we should have known, but didn't. For example, she suggests that one reason people are so wildly overconfident in the accuracy of their beliefs is that being wrong has no telltale phenomenology. We know what it feels like to have been wrong in the past, perhaps just seconds ago, but not what it feels like to be wrong in the present, because the instant we realize that what we believe is wrong, we no longer believe it. "It does feel like something to be wrong," she says. "It feels like being right." When Schulz suggests that memory and imagination are essentially forms of error - the perception of events that aren't actually happening - we wonder what she could be thinking, and why we didn't think of it first. "Being Wrong" is smart and lively, but not without its faults. Schulz promises what she calls a "wrongology" but never builds the systematic arguments that "-ology" requires. Instead we get a "wrongologue" - a series of observations and insights that leave us feeling that we've had all the good thoughts one could possibly have about wrongness, but that we still don't know which ones are . . . well, right. Compelling points are not assembled into necessary conclusions, and so her book ends up being the sum of its parts, but not more. Error, though, is a sweeping subject, and a rigorous wrongology may be too much to ask of anyone. Schulz tells us early on that her goal is "to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility" and to "linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong." These goals she accomplishes with aplomb. For most of us, errors are like cockroaches: we stomp them the moment we see them and then flush the corpse as fast as we can, never pausing to contemplate the intricate design of nature's great survivor, never asking what it might reveal beyond itself. But Schulz is the patient naturalist who carefully examines the nasty little miracles the rest of us so eagerly discard. Kathryn Schulz's goal is 'to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility.' Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of "Stumbling on Happiness" and the host of "This Emotional Life" on PBS.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 25, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Here's a fascinating counterpoint to the notion that making a mistake somehow diminishes you as a person. We shouldn't fear error, the author says; rather, we should embrace it because it's our capacity for making mistakes that makes us who we are. ( To err is human isn't just an empty cliché.) Schulz explores the nature of error: are big mistakes fundamentally different from small mistakes, or are they all essentially the same? How much does peer pressure, or crowd response, affect our capacity to blunder? How and why do we remember relatively insignificant mistakes for the rest of our lives, long after they have ceased to be relevant to anything? And what role does error-blindness our inability to know when we are in the process of making a mistake play in our daily lives? Schulz writes in a lively style, asks lots of compelling questions, and uses plenty of examples to illustrate her points. Put this one in the same general category as Gladwell's Blink (2005), LeGault's Think! (2006), and Shore's Blunder (2008): user-friendly, entertaining looks at the way our minds work.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the spirit of Blink and Predictably Irrational (but with a large helping of erudition), journalist Schulz casts a fresh and irreverent eye upon the profound meanings behind our most ordinary behaviors-in this instance, how we make mistakes, how we behave when we find we have been wrong, and how our errors change us. "[I]t is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are," she asserts. Schulz writes with such lucidity and wit that her philosophical enquiry becomes a page-turner. She deftly incorporates Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Freud, along with an array of contemporary social scientists and even a spin with Shakespeare and Keats. There's heavy stuff here, but no heavy-handedness. Being wrong encompasses the cataclysmic (economic collapse) and the commonplace (leaving a "laptop in front of the window before the storm"). Being wrong may lead to fun (playing with and understanding optical illusions) or futility (the Millerite expectation of the Rapture in 1844). Being wrong can be transformative, and Schultz writes, "I encourage us to see error as a gift in itself, a rich and irreplaceable source of humor, art, illumination, individuality, and change"-an apt description of her engrossing study. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her first book, Schulz (former editor of Grist) fuses contemporary psychological theories on "wrongology" with classical philosophy, creating a well-rounded picture of what it means to be wrong. Rather than focusing on the negativity normally surrounding wrongness, Schulz urges the reader to see error as an adventure and, more important, a completely natural state of being. She uses a wide array of examples, including a "superior mirage" in the Arctic Ocean and a blind woman who believed that she could see, to illustrate how and why people get things wrong and how to accept and embrace error. Schulz challenges readers to confront their own sense of certainty, peppering her text with images of optical illusions in a unique method of reader involvement. Verdict While the text is consistently insightful and entertaining, its main points are occasionally hidden beneath muddled examples and Schulz's overtly philosophical approach to error. Not quite a casual read, this book is most fitting for academics and readers interested in the complexity of being wrong.-Melissa Mallon, Univ. of Pittsburgh Lib., Johnstown (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sometimes plodding, sometimes illuminating disquisition on the fine art of getting it wrong.The world of error, writes former Grist editor Schulz, is not black and white. "[B]eing a little wrong in the right direction is one thing," she writes, "and being massively wrong in the wrong direction is something else entirely." Arguing over what direction is right and wrong, of course, occupies much of our days. Think of the invasion of Iraq over WMDs, for instance, which lies in a category of belief-driven error that persists because the perpetrator lacks a suitable alternate theory, a plan B. In that light, writes the author, investment in not wholly thought-through theories is a great cause of trouble, the equivalent of sunk costs, "money that is already spent and can't be recovered." As with much pop science of the daythink Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson or Chris AndersonSchulz consults little-heard-of authorities, in this case experts in what might be called error science. Yet her approach is more anthropological, even philosophical, than scientific. For example, she closely examines the role morality plays in our operational notions of right and wrong, since we live in "a culture that simultaneously despises error and insists that it is central to our lives." The author covers the ground well, with a particularly good account of why eyewitness police reports are so riddled with error. At times, however, her discussion bogs down in forced moments of supposed significancee.g., a dream sequence featuring Samuel Taylor Coleridgeand longueurs in which things left better unexplained are subjected to weird science (incongruity theory as applied to jokes). There are also many areas in which other recent booksparticularly Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto (2009)do the same work better.Even with its faults, however, one has to like a book that proclaims, "To fuck up is to find adventure."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
