Why do most people refuse to accept that they are wrong
I have come across a lot’s of people like these. like 99% of them. Sometimes it makes me think twice if what i am saying is wrong? What’s wrong with them. Is it so hard to swallow your pride and acknowledge that the other person is speaking facts? When they come to know they are wrong they proceed to insult/make fun of others to save their ass. Just why?
i actually find it reasonably easy to identify my biases, it’s just basically impossible to directly act on that knowledge.
if i realize i’m actually probably in the wrong i tend to just sorta… slide into the shadows and disengage, which is at least better than continuing to insist that i’m correct and just digging in deeper… Then in the future the brain tends to have let go of it and people have forgot what was said previously and i can upgrade to a more correct take.
I suppose the positions you are describing are not reached by reasoning, rather by being part of a group, religion or ideology. In those cases it’s quite clear that they can’t give up the position unless they weaken their ties to that group/religion/ideology.
Some times in their life people are open to big changes, but most of the time not.
I encounter that all the time especially on public forums like this. This is a quote from an article I found about it online: According to psychologist, speaker and author Guy Winch, most people who consistently refuse to admit they're wrong do so because they have incredibly fragile egos. They clam up and insist they're right, demonstrating what experts term "psychological rigidity", as a defense mechanism.
Also I think that telling someone they are wrong comes across as a criticism about their intellect and they respond defensively by instinct. And, another reason is because people don't want to believe anything that contradicts their preferred view of the world. So if you "correct" someone they tend to act like you're attacking them or as too stupid to know what "truth" is.
It's really a telling distinction because today, most people behave in this defensive way. You don't see many people willing to concede or say, "wow that's a different point of view than I have considered, maybe it requires me to spend some thought on why I feel the way I do." Which is the real value of differing opinions; they help us re-assess and redefine the reasons why we feel the way we do.
In my experience, this typically goes away as they get older with most people. You eventually hit a point where people’s impressions of you dont matter anymore and it becomes much easier to freely admit you’re wrong.
Of course, there are people that never grow out of it, and that is often read as confidence. There is a reason that “fake it until you make it” works.
what to do people start verbally abusing me
When I was 18, I started hangin out with a different crowd.
because me. me tho
meeeeeee
It’s frustrating, because the people who normally call this out are the people who are most likely to be the ones doing it.
They see people around them fail to think critically, they criticize them for that, and then turn around and never question their own opinions. Because “obviously I am right”.
Not accusing you of it, but I’m sure a lot of people reading this fall into that category. Maybe we all do.
Online it can become a competitive thing. They still want to “win” the argument even if the light comes on and they realize they have incorrect or incomplete information and the other side has made better arguments with better evidence. I suspect most people fall into this trap at some point in online forums. I definitely have. Guilty as charged.
And not to excuse this behavior, but part of it comes from poor sportsmanship and lack of grace from damned near everyone vis a vis Twitter/X/Facebook/reddit. People who “win” a competition like this are quick to gloat on how they “owned” the other person. Worse than this, trying to be reasonable and open-minded in these spaces often comes across as weakness.
There is a small movement of folks who call for radical empathy. This is where you do your level best to make a good faith effort to fully understand and see the merits of the other side’s arguments even if you don’t agree. That way lies learning and growth.
I don’t see admitting that I’m wrong as a weakness, and I’m not afraid to be the first to make a “concession”. I had a very few arguments on reddit turn into something positive (to the surprise of both parties) because I admitted I had made an incorrect assumption, my reasoning was flawed, or whatever. That made it “okay” for the other individual to admit they had made a mistake, too. Importantly, I didn’t use that as an opportunity to judge, criticize, or attack them. From there, we had a real conversation. It didn’t happen often, but it was great when it did!
Of course, most of the time people made cheap insults or just ignored me, but I was okay with that, too. Sure, it was disappointing, but the whole conversation was right there for anyone who wanted to read it. At least I wasn’t the one who looked like a petty asshole.
I’ve often had the same question as OP. I’ve read and understood the replies in this thread, and some of them are very good. I understand the points being made, but I still don’t get it, ya know? Everybody is wrong sometimes. There’s absolutely no shame in it, and it’s completely unrealistic to pretend that you never are. Plus, by keeping an open mind, being wrong is a fantastic way to learn!
I agree with you that it shouldn’t come across as weakness, and to a mature person it is sign of strength. I should have phrased it better, but my intention was to say that in these online forums many of the ‘spectators’ (who up and down vote, and/or pile on) seem to read nuanced arguments and open-minded thinking as being “weak”.
In other words, there’s often too many points scored for having an aggressive style, nasty sarcasm, insults, etc.
It’s a basic psychological need to be able to trust that your brain can be right. A lot of psychological problems can result if you don’t trust your own brain to be able to solve problems and cope with new information.
Some people don’t learn the value of accepting mistakes/failure as part of learning. As a result, they will associate being wrong with weakening the trust they have in their brain. They don’t want to believe that their brain may not come up with answers for the problems and changes they face in life. So they will deny that their brain is incorrect.
It’s an ugly insecurity, but it’s totally understandable from an evolutionary perspective. We need to be able to trust our brains to navigate life’s challenges.
Can you elaborate on what you mean psych problems when you don't trust your brain?
I have memory issues and so when I'm doing something more complex than muscle memory I write it down. So I don't trust myself on specific memory tasks, like phone numbers.
I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t explain the exact theory, but basically my understanding is that self-confidence and self-esteem are linked to the concept of self-efficacy, which means the trust that your mind will be able to cope with the challenges presented to it. Low self-esteem and self-confidence are linked to all kinds of insecurities and challenges functioning.
Disclaimer: I recently began working on my own low self-confidence with my therapist and she pointed me to a book, the contents of which I’m mostly regurgitating here. The book is “The Six Pillars of Self-esteem” by Nathaniel Branden.
Hey, I insist I’m right sometimes because I’m fuckin stupid
How very dare you sir
I have struggled against this for a long time. I tend to be a pretty prideful person and the urge to shift blame when I fuck up and deflect when faced with being wrong is something that has I have to actively work to correct. The difference for me came when I was younger in dealing with my parents: My dad was far from perfect and there were plenty of times he was in the wrong, but always made sure to sit down with me and apologize if he fucked up. My mom, for the most part, was better at avoiding being in the wrong in the first place, but when she was, I never once got her to apologize or admit her mistake. Of the two, I was hurt far more by the latter, and make it a point to be willing to admit my shortcomings.
The most difficult part after I identified it as an issue is to not let my willingness to apologize/admit my mistake become a cart blanche for continuing the behavior. If I fuck up, apologizing only means something if I work on the mistake. If I am wrong about somethimg, I should learn about both the thing and where my misconceptions came from.
For a lot of people, realizing it is an issue is difficult, because you first have to let go of the pride by acknowledging it. Shame isn't a good motivator, as it makes most people double down on pride.
Sometimes, mainly when it is stuff that isn't rooted in true or false. If I am factually wrong, it isn't usually concious and I tend realize my mistake after the fact. If I am in the wrong in an emotional/moral way, I tend to realize my mistake while I am still emotionally charged, so I am not always ready to acknowledge it or effectively communicate my apology, though I still try to either admit fault or tell the other person I'd like to discuss it after I have calmed down.
Either way, I usually allow some amount of time for self reflection, which I think is better for me. It allows me to formulate my reasoning for apologizing/admitting my mistake, calm down, and let go of the ego. I have found that even if there is a long pause, the other person almost always will take the follow up discussion with kindness and respect, and appreciates the emotional/intellectual honesty and vulnerability. Nobody has ever rubbed it in my face. Which helps encourage the practice going forward.
It also, in general, facilitates better real-time admission of incorrectness to practice in this way.
I read somewhere a while back that it's supposedly an evolutionary thing. In a social competition for resource allocation, confidently arguing your position regardless of its correctness is more beneficial than admitting you may be wrong.
It's probably exacerbated by the internet, where the relative anonymity and psychological disconnection further reduces any benefits to admitting to an error.
Evolutionary biologist here.
This is actually a tricky one. Lying (and I’m going to fold the projection of false confidence in with that one because I’m talking about deception, intentional or otherwise, not a moral concept) is only effective if others believe you.
Humans, as the most highly social of the primates and ranking among the most highly social animals on earth, have adapted to believe each other, because this helps with trust, coordination, shared identity, learning, and so on. However, it also creates a vulnerability to manipulation by dishonest actors. Again, I’m not talking about a moral dimension here. There are species in which mating is initiated with the gift of a nuptial present (eg a dead bug) from the male to the female. Sometimes the male will give a fake present (already desiccated insect, eg) to trick the female, and sometimes it works. Deception and detection are an arms race, and it’s believed by many to be one of the drivers that lead to the development of human intelligence, where our information processing capacity developed alongside our increasing social complexity.
The problem is that when lying becomes the default, then the beneficial effects of communication cease. It’s like when you stop playing games with a kid that just cheats every time, or stop buying from a store that just rips people off. It’s a strategy that only works if few enough people play it. There’s tons of caveats and additional variables, but that’s the baseline. So why do we still see so much of it?
The first component of course is confirmation bias. If 90% of our interactions are trustworthy, the ones that stick out will be the deceptions, and the biggest deceptions will get the most notice. The second is that the deceptions as a whole have not been impactful enough, over time, to overcome the advantages of trust, either in biological time or in social evolutionary time. You will notice that more trust is given to in-group rather than out-group members, and a number of researchers think that has to do with larger social adaptations, such as collective punishment of deceivers - sending someone to jail for writing bad checks, say, is easier if they’re part of your community as opposed to a tourist from another country. We can also see cultural differences in levels of trust accorded in-group and out-group persons, but that’s getting into a lot of detail.
The third major operator is the concept of the self. This is a subject where we are just being able to start making scientific headway - understanding where the concept of a self comes from in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary dynamics - but this is still very much a new science layered on top of ancient philosophy. In the concept of the self there is a component of what I’m going to calll the physical integrity of the structure. People find being wrong painful - there are social situations that activate the same parts of the physical brain as physical pain and distress do. This is especially true of those ideas are seen as being held by other group members, because you now have the group structural integrity on top of the one in idea-space. That’s where you get people willing to literally die on the hill of Trump winning in 2020. For the evolutionary construction and nature of the self I’d recommend Sapolsky and Metzinger - it’s too new and too complex to get into here. If you want to just summarize it in your mind, call this component ego defense.
I think that’s most of what’s going on, at least as we understand it so far.
Because they’re never taught or encounter the notion that its fun to be wrong and learn more to correct and be able to speak more confidently in future.
I love when people correct me and we have a little discourse and the truth-seeking function of this format is satisfied in the end with everybody playfully (or sometimes testily but still vaguely good-faith) cross-examining each other and leaving space for learning and retaining space to allow people to revise when they are genuine in their attempts to understand.
Best thing my daddy taught me; no matter how confident you are, you could always be wrong. Brains are just unreliable sometimes. Sky is blue? Could be wrong. You’re N years old? Probably… but you could be wrong.
Accepting this allows one to improve. Best we can do is recognize this, and try our best to minimize how often we’re wrong.
This has allowed me to withhold confidence in many situations. Not in deference, but in thoughtful acceptance that I truly might be wrong.
Best dad ever.
That really warms my heart to hear. I’m trying to be one of the good dads.
Just today my 9 year old and I had a conversation about how I’m always the first to step up and admit when I make a mistake, and communicate what I did or will do to fix it, where I have colleagues who will try to hide their mistakes and front like they never ever make them. Going so far as lying to clients, bosses, and coworkers all the way.
The problem with this is the quiet nihilism baked into it, which is the same reason so many people believe that widely supported science could be wrong.
In the absolute sense, it is true. Though things like “the sky is blue” is more about linguistics, but for a layperson it’s kind of inconsequential either way. While there is a small possibility that scientific consensus could be wrong, there is orders of magnitude bigger chance that unwarranted skepticism is dangerous.
I don’t think so, and he and I have discussed this in epistemological terms several times over the years. “Sky is blue” example was probably bad as would have been “earth is round” etc. The point isn’t that anything can be wrong, though strictly speaking, I guess it can. What we mean is precisely that our minds have the ability to mislead us and powerfully so. But part of the drive to minimize that is to understand the value of consensus in both scientific communities and wider communities.
To have the best ratio of things about which were correct vs incorrect, being confident in things like the outcome of refereed science is helpful.
It depends. Some people will relentlessly mock you for being wrong, no matter how you handle it. At work I have no problem admitting I messed up something, there’s no point and always it’s better to just fix it, right?
But with my ex, he was just dead judgemental. Might as well double down if I wasn’t sure since my accuracy rate was higher than his.
With husband I can just say I don’t know and it’s fine. On the occasion I send him something not factual I do send correction there is no penalty, for lack of a better word.
Cannizzaro
Swedneck
sour
Peepo
kalkulat
HipsterTenZero
kamenlady
vlad
Phil K
Boozilla
magnetosphere
Noble Shift
uphillbothways
drailin
cacheson
spittingimage
BaroqueInMind