The simple reason our beliefs are often wrong

Errors are an unavoidable part of being human. But the reasons why our beliefs have such a powerful grip on us – and what happens when our conviction in them is shaken – are surprisingly complex.

Mistakes matter: they can destroy our self-confidence, alienate us from others, land us in prison or even kill us. But although errors are part of who we are, it’s also in our nature to downplay, cover-up, and deny them.

It’s hard to predict being wrong. At the time, it seems like we’re on the right path. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kathryn Schulz calls this the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: "We can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time."

A “database design flaw” in our brains means that we’re not good at remembering or categorizing instances of being wrong. That means we’re liable to commit the same mistakes, and are surprised when we do.

The history of science amounts to a history of errors, which each generation corrects, only to be corrected in the next. So why should we assume that what we believe today is correct? And how can we safely say that we have knowledge of anything?

Not only are we easily fooled, but we can’t help justifying our foolish choices. We love knowledge, but we’re not good at ensuring that it’s right, or recognizing when we don’t know something. In the absence of knowledge, we make things up.

We think our model of the world is the world itself, which leads us to make three assumptions. 1) Ignorance assumption: Since we’re convinced that our belief is based on fact, we think that people who disagree just don’t have the right information.

2) Idiocy assumption: Those who disagree with us know the facts but don’t have the brains to understand them. 3) Evil assumption: Others have the facts and can understand them, but have deliberately decided to ignore them.

Self-deception has benefits, however. Believing that we’re better looking than we are, for example, keeps us from being depressed. And we wouldn’t attempt half the things we do if we had a more accurate picture of what we can achieve.

Wrongness can even make us optimistic. If we know we’ve been wrong, we assume we must be right in the future as learning represents progression. Seen this way, error is not a defect of the human condition, but part of its glory.