None of us like to be wrong but science writer Kathryn Schulz makes the case that being wrong provides powerful insights into cognition, human identify, social relationships and underpins the scientific method. Students always find visual illusions fascinating and they are also intrigued about how readily we can mis-remember. Her arguments are just as provocative. Schulz argues that we should not see mistakes as diminishing you as a person; instead the human capacity to make mistakes actually makes us who we are. In her latest book “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” and this Ted Talk, Schulz explores the nature of error: are all mistakes the same, or are they all essentially the same? How does peer pressure, or crowd response, affect our capacity to make mistakes? 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? What is error-blindness? These are all topics that are relevant to the IB Psychology Course.
The Ted Talk should provoke a lively debate about our compulsion to be right and the need to acknowledge when we are not.
