Five Perspectives on Error

Notes from excellent article
by Maria Popova, from Brain Pickings:
5 Must-Read Books on Error & the Science of Being Wrong

Full article: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/04/must-read-books-being-wrong/#ixzz1JD5aNoQC
1 Being wrong

However disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.... 

To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometime seven dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story... 

Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

2 Why we make mistakes

We don’t think our perception is economical; we think it’s perfect. When we look at something, we think we see everything. But we don’t. Same with memory: we might think we remember everything, especially commonly encountered things like the words to the National Anthem, or the details on the surface of a penny—but we don’t. Our brains are wired to give us the most bang for the buck; they strip out all sorts of stuff that seems unimportant at the time. But we don’t know what’s been stripped out. One of the consequences of this is that we tend to be overconfident about the things we think we do know. And overconfidence is a huge cause of human error. 

Joseph Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

3 The invisible gorilla

Published 11 years after the original experiment, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us encapsulates Harvard researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’ findings on the mechanisms behind this “inattentional blindness” and how they translate into fundamental human behavior.

4 Mistakes were made [but not by me]

President Reagan's phrase 'mistakes were made' became an infamous hallmark of diffusion of responsibility and the failure to own our mistakes, which inspired the title of social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson‘s excellent Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts — an ambitious quest to unravel the underpinnings of self-justification and, in the process, make us better human beings.  

As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral or stupid. Most of us will never be in a position to make decisions affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people, but whether the consequences of our mistakes are trivial or tragic, on a small scale or a national canvas, most of us find it difficult, if not impossible, to say, ‘I was wrong; I made a terrible mistake.’ The higher the stakes — emotional, financial, moral — the greater the difficulty.

Tavris and Aronson examine the root cause of these self-righteous yet erroneous behaviors: Cognitive dissonance — the mental anguish that results from trying to reconcile two conflicting ideas, such as a belief we hold and a circumstantial fact that contradicts it. In our deep-seated need to see ourselves as honorable, competent and consistent, we often bend reality to confirm this self-perception, which in turn results in a domino effect of errors.

5 How we know what isn't so

Written 20 years ago, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich is arguably the most important critique on the biases of human reason ever published. It’s as much a throughly researched investigation into the science of mind as it is a compelling — and increasingly timely — treatise on the importance of not letting superstition and sloppy thinking cloud our judgement on a cultural and sociopolitical level.

People do not hold questionable beliefs simply because they have not been exposed to the relevant evidence. Nor do people hold questionable beliefs simply because they are stupid or gullible. Quite the contrary. Evolution has given us powerful intellectual tools for processing vast amounts of information with accuracy and dispatch, and our questionable beliefs derive primarily from the misapplication or overutilization of generally valid and effective strategies for knowing. Just as we are subject to perceptual illusions in spite of, and largely because of, our extraordinary perceptual capacities, so too are many of our cognitive shortcomings closely related to, or even an unavoidable cost of, our greatest strengths.