Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-2

Part 2, Chapters 3-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-8

Part 3, Chapters 9-10

Part 3, Chapters 11-13

Part 4, Chapters 14-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 3, Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “The Experience of Error”

Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Denial and Acceptance”

Chapter 11 begins with the story of Penny Beerntsen, who, on July 29, 1985, was assaulted on the shores of Lake Michigan while going for a jog. During the assault, Penny desperately tried to memorize the features of her attacker’s face in order to later identify him. When presented with nine photos of potential assailants, Penny zeroed in on a man named Steven Avery, whom she later also identified in a lineup. The trial against Avery began on December 9, lasting one week, and by the end of it, he was convicted and sentenced to 32 years in prison. When the Wisconsin Innocence Project—part of the national organization that utilizes DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions—agreed to take Avery’s case, Penny learned that Avery was not her assailant. She had misidentified him. When Penny learned she had accused the wrong man of her assault, she instantly accepted her mistake and apologized to Steven. Schulz uses this story to discuss the themes of denial and acceptance in the face of mistakes.

The author contends that while DNA testing is beginning to prevail as a key form of evidence, confident eyewitness testimony remains the primary predictor of a jury’s verdict. The word “witness” stems from “wit,” meaning “knowledge.” Thus, a witness is one who knows. Considering the fallibility of the human mind, however, the author questions what actually occurs when we bear witness.

One replicated experiment that has studied this question was first carried out in 1902 by Franz von Liszt, a professor of criminology at the University of Berlin. Liszt choreographed a situation in a college classroom in which two students got into a fierce (but staged) argument. One of the arguing students took out a gun. and a shot was fired. No one was truly hurt, as the setup was fake, but Liszt used the scenario to test the eyewitness accounts of the fellow students, who were asked to provide detailed individual accounts of what had happened. Liszt discovered that the most accurate students got over 25% of the facts wrong, while the students with the least accurate accounts were wrong 80% of the time.

Denial is a common response to the feelings evoked by such mistakes. In fact, the author argues that denial is a healthy reaction to grief and fear because it softens difficult information that would be too sudden or intense to deal with. As a protective function, denial blocks unwelcome feelings of discomfort and anxiety, but this defensive mechanism also defends us against the experience of erring. Thus, to be in denial—which entails not knowing things that we should know given available evidence—means “we must be both the deceiver and the deceived” (231).

How we take on the complicated state of self-deception is a mystery, raising a question about the moral status of denial. If our own minds are figuratively divided against themselves—one part oblivious to its own errors and the other part working to maintain this state—Schulz wonders who should bear the responsibility for being incorrect.

Denial is always an attractive option, Schulz argues, in its ability to keep pain, guilt, and humiliation at bay. However, denial is not simply about rejecting a challenging and complicated external world. Acceptance is likewise not about simply accepting the facts—it is about accepting ourselves and learning “to live both with and without the truth” (246).

Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Heartbreak”

Chapter 12 deals with wrongness and love, an issue that the author deserves its own category because nothing, she says, matters more to us than being right about other people. As children, we require others’ understanding in order to get our needs met for survival; however, as we grow older, getting our needs met depends upon understanding others. Even so, few things are more gratifying than the feeling of someone deeply understanding us.

There is and always will be a gap between the self and others that allows for misunderstandings. One tool to bridge this gap is communication; however, this implies interpretation, which can go awry. Another tool is extrapolation, which involves making inferences about others’ internal states based on our own.

The author points to American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel begins by stating that as mammals, bats must have some sort of conscious experience, and thus, being a bat must feel like something. Precisely what that something is like, however, we can never know. Schulz uses this thought experiment to point out that the more we differ from one another, the less we are able to relate to each other, which is ultimately dehumanizing. Nagel’s point is that our inability to comprehend another being’s inner reality does not make such reality any less real or valuable to that being.

The distinction between our self-understanding and our understanding of others, says the author, boils down to the fact that a self can only be understood from the inside, meaning we cannot understand others as selves. Regardless, we tend to view others as virtually transparent while seeing ourselves as having rich, dynamic internal worlds. This presents a methodological problem: We think we can understand others on the basis of criteria we reject for ourselves.

The rift between ourselves and others is another reason we detest being wrong, Schulz asserts, because it reminds us of the distance between ourselves and the rest of the world—of the limits of being a human. The attempted remedy for this rift, the author claims, is love. Schulz introduces the term “Platonic love.” The term draws from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who argues that an elevated form of interpersonal love is the love of one mind for another (as opposed to a love for someone based on their body, for example). This love has the power to reclaim cosmic truths and restore us to completeness, the author says. She remarks that our understanding of love has changed little since the time of Plato, as we view love as two souls uniting—a “communion of consciousnesses” (261).

Schulz claims that we are doubly wrong when we err about love: We are firstly wrong about a specific person and secondly wrong, more generally, because “we embraced an account of [love] that is manifestly implausible” (264). Our notions that love is eternal, that the person cannot be wrong for us, turn out incorrect, which compounds our heartache. Confronting these feelings reminds us that we are all ultimately alone in the world.

The author reminds us that when we enter into an intimate relationship, we also sign up to live with another person’s reality—their own personal worldview. We must accept their reality alongside the one we have in our own minds in order to become intrigued and moved by another person’s perspective.

Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary: “Transformation”

Chapter 13 begins with the story of C. P. Ellis, who ran the Durham branch of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. For Ellis, the author explains, white supremacy made his challenging life more tolerable; he scapegoated Black people as an explanation for his life’s difficulties, and the Klan provided him a community. He was eventually appointed as Exalted Cyclops of the Durham branch, a position of power. During the 1970s, North Carolina began desegregating its schools, and the Durham Human Relations Committee agreed that workshops should take place to persuade Durham’s citizens to cooperate in the integration. Convinced that his constituents required a spokesperson, Ellis agreed to represent the city’s poor, white, anti-integration citizens. Meanwhile, Ann Atwater, an African American woman who was a community leader deeply involved in activism, agreed to represent the city’s impoverished, disenfranchised Black citizens.

The workshops got off to a rocky start, with both Ellis and Atwater insistent that each other’s race was the source of Durham’s problems. When Ellis began receiving death threats for agreeing to even participate in the workshops, he decided to work with Atwater. After one of the workshops, the two began talking about their concerns as parents for their children and their struggles with poverty, and Ellis “felt a jolt of recognition” as he realized for the first time that Atwater was also a human being facing the same challenges he was (277). Before the workshops ended, Ellis turned in his keys to the Ku Klux Klan chapter.

This story illustrates how conversion in the face of wrongness often involves an entire change in identity, challenging and transforming our sense of self. Furthermore, this conversion demonstrates that we are not always how we imagine ourselves. Our mistakes thus “represent a moment of alienation from ourselves” (281). The issue, says Schulz, is our inability to know ourselves well enough or to maintain a static state for long enough to consistently predict the future. Error thus springs from a gap within: the mind’s representation of something versus the mind’s operation of that representation. The gap puts us in the perplexing position of having a mind more expansive than we believed we had. Despite our desire for perfect self-consistency, the self has inexplicability and unpredictability—uncomfortable qualities, as we would like to think we know and understand ourselves.

We tend to believe that certain aspects of the self, such as personality and core beliefs, are moral and intellectual properties that should remain fixed, and error challenges this rigid self-understanding. If we are as we conceive ourselves to be—consistent and knowable beings—it becomes difficult to see how we could be mistaken about ourselves. However, the optimistic model of wrongness reminds us that mistakes, instead of signifying failure, are opportunities to find greater self-understanding.

Schulz concludes that a being wrong can be powerfully transformative: It can give us more compassion and help us respect others in their capacity for both rightness and wrongness.

Part 3, Chapters 11-13 Analysis

The main theme explored in Chapters 11-13 is the self within relationship, which the author approaches from several vantage points.

She first looks at the relationship of self to self, using the idea of self-deception, where denial is a means of buffering uncomfortable feelings. However, this state of self-deception is elusive because the mind is figuratively divided against itself, and the self becomes at once the deceiver and the deceived.

The author then examines the relationship of the self to others, and she emphasizes the gap between these—a divide that means we can be wrong about people. She uses Thomas Nagel’s essay to illustrate that we can never truly know what it is like to be someone else, but this inability to relate does not make others’ realities any less real or less valuable. Furthermore, the self can only be understood from within; thus, we cannot understand other entities as selves, and this reminds us of the distance between ourselves and others. As painful as the self-other gap is, it is vital that we acknowledge it; we must accept that the other person is a separate entity with their own worldview. Only then can we respect them and encounter new ways of seeing the world.

Finally, Schulz returns to the self-relationship, this time from the angle of conversion, in which our sense of self is challenged and transformed. This is the opposite of self-deception. Conversion of our beliefs can be uncomfortable as we learn we are not who we imagined; we thus experience an alienation from the self. While we would like to believe that we know and understand ourselves, the self is too inconsistent for this. Furthermore, we tend to erroneously think that our traits are stable, and the discrepancy calls into question how, if we know ourselves, we can be mistaken. Schulz uses this discussion to reaffirm the optimistic model of error, in which our mistake—about ourselves and others—are part of a journey toward a greater understanding.