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

Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error dives into one of the most uncomfortable, and yet universal, human experiences — making mistakes. A journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, Schulz brings a mix of storytelling, psychology, and philosophy to her subject, asking us to reflect not just on the fact that we err, but on what error means for our identity, relationships, and society.

What makes the book so engaging is Schulz’s ability to turn something most of us dread — being wrong — into a fascinating lens on what it means to be human. She challenges the cultural stigma around mistakes and shows how error, rather than being something to avoid at all costs, is essential for learning, creativity, and even love.

Schulz begins by reminding us how slippery error really is. Being wrong feels just like being right — until the instant we’re corrected. Certainty isn’t a reliable marker of truth but a feeling, and often a misleading one. As she notes, our sense of being right is “just the inner experience of a particular picture in our heads, not an actual guarantee of accuracy.”

When our mistakes come to light, they often spark a small existential crisis. We ask ourselves: What was I thinking? How could I have done that? Error isn’t just about an incorrect fact or a missed calculation — it feels like a reflection on our character. Moral and intellectual wrongness have historically been linked, so being wrong can carry a heavy weight of shame. Schulz points out how people try to avoid responsibility with familiar strategies: “I was wrong, but…” or the even more evasive, “Mistakes were made.”

We’re also far more generous with ourselves than we are with others. Noticing and pointing out other people’s mistakes can feel satisfying — “If it is sweet to be right, then it is downright savory to point out that someone is wrong.” Our culture tends to treat wrongness as a failure of intelligence or morality, which only reinforces the stigma of admitting our own errors.

But Schulz urges us to take a different perspective. Erring isn’t just a problem to be solved; it’s an opportunity to rethink how we relate to ourselves and others. Wrongness is a given in human life, but also a gift. Without it, we wouldn’t be forced to adapt, to re-examine our beliefs, or to grow.

If error is inevitable, then it’s worth asking: why do our minds lead us astray so often? Schulz shows that the answer lies in how perception, memory, and reasoning are built.

Take illusions, for example. Our eyes and ears are usually reliable, but they can be tricked into seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. These errors aren’t proof of a faulty system; in fact, they arise from the same mechanisms that usually keep us safe and oriented in the world. Illusions, Schulz suggests, should be a gateway to humility — a reminder that our sense of certainty is no guarantee of truth. They even provide a strange kind of joy: finding satisfaction in being wrong.

This “error-blindness” goes deeper than our senses. Schulz describes Anton’s Syndrome, a condition in which people who are blind insist they can still see. The lesson is striking: just as we can be blind to our blindness, we can be wrong without realising it. Certainty often feels identical to accuracy, even when it’s not.

Ignorance compounds the problem. People tend to answer confidently when they think they know something, even if they’re completely mistaken. Psychologists call this “confabulation” — inventing explanations without realising we’re wrong. What we lack, Schulz argues, is a “humiliation-free” way of admitting ignorance. Instead, our beliefs harden into models of the world, which we mistake for the world itself.

This tendency feeds into what psychologists call naïve realism: the belief that our views simply mirror reality. It leads to two constraints on belief. First, we only see past beliefs as flawed — never our current ones. Second, we assume others’ beliefs are biased, but not our own — a trap Schulz calls the “bias blind spot.”

When we encounter people who disagree with us, we often fall back on three assumptions:

1. Ignorance assumption — they just don’t know the facts.

2. Idiocy assumption — they know the facts but can’t comprehend them.

3. Evil assumption — they know and understand but reject the truth willfully.

Each of these assumptions shields us from having to reconsider our own position. As comforting as they are, they prevent us from seeing disagreement as an opportunity to learn.

Our individual mistakes are unsettling enough, but Schulz shows that wrongness scales up dramatically when it enters politics, science, and culture. Collective error isn’t just possible — it has shaped societies as much as truth has.

History provides endless reminders. Scientific “facts” once held beyond question — from geocentrism to mistaken medical practices — were later overturned. Cultural stereotypes and institutional dogmas can persist for centuries, defended with absolute certainty, only to eventually collapse under evidence. Yet at the time, those who questioned them were often dismissed as ignorant or even dangerous.

Politics offers an especially clear example of how stubbornly we cling to our beliefs. Certainty, Schulz argues, is “toxic to both imagination and empathy,” yet political culture rewards it. Admitting error or changing one’s mind is seen as weakness rather than wisdom. That resistance doesn’t just stall progress — it deepens division. We punish leaders for evolving their views, while simultaneously criticising them for failing to adapt.

Schulz points out that our attempts to eliminate error on a societal level usually fail for three reasons. First, to succeed we would need a perfect ability to distinguish truth from falsehood — an impossible task. Second, even well-intentioned efforts to eradicate error tend to backfire, producing unintended consequences. And third, not all attempts are well-intentioned in the first place; many are motivated by power rather than truth.

The best tool we have for navigating collective error, she argues, isn’t certainty but doubt — “deep, systematic, and abiding.” Doubt keeps societies flexible, able to revise mistakes rather than entrench them.

If being wrong is unsettling in politics or science, it can feel devastating on a personal level. Schulz shows how tightly our sense of self is bound up with being right. We like to imagine ourselves as consistent, rational beings — “I am shy,” “I’m good with numbers,” “I always know what’s best.” But what happens when the evidence proves otherwise?

Error doesn’t just challenge a belief; it challenges the believer. Discovering that we were mistaken forces us to confront cracks in the story we tell about who we are. That’s why our first instinct is often defensiveness — dodging responsibility with “I was wrong, but…” or the passive “Mistakes were made.” It allows us to hold on to a sense of inner consistency.

Certainty, meanwhile, offers the comfort of stability. It feels good, and it helps preserve group belonging. Letting go of a belief isn’t just about abandoning an idea; it often feels like betraying our community or even our identity. Social proof, conformity, and groupthink all reinforce this — we’d rather be wrong together than risk standing alone.

Yet Schulz argues that certainty is “toxic to both imagination and empathy.” It blocks us from seeing through another’s eyes and from imagining alternatives. Fully experiencing wrongness, on the other hand, can be transformative:

“This is the thing about fully experiencing wrongness. It strips us of all our theories, including our theories about ourselves. This isn’t fun while it's happening — it leaves us feeling flayed, laid bare to the bone and the world — but it does make possible the rarest of occurrences: real change.”

Real change, however, requires more than abandoning a belief — it also requires replacing it. Schulz notes that environments play a big role here: some encourage reflection and growth, while others punish it. Wisdom, she suggests, often comes later in life, when we’ve lived long enough to know that nobody knows everything.

If error unsettles our identities, nowhere does it cut deeper than in love. Schulz suggests that mistakes in love feel uniquely intolerable because of what we expect from it: unity, transcendence, and permanence. To be wrong about a person — or worse, about love itself — shakes us to the core.

She draws on the counselor Harville Hendrix, who explains the emotional power of falling in love in four ways: recognition (“I feel like I already know you”), timelessness (“I can’t remember when I didn’t know you”), reunification (“With you I feel whole”), and necessity (“I can’t live without you”). Each carries with it a kind of error-blindness — when we’re in love, it’s hard to imagine ever being out of it.

But reality eventually intrudes. We often experience not just a specific error about a partner, but a general error about love itself — that it could be perfect, enduring, and infallible. This double blow compounds heartbreak. As Schulz writes:

“That person isn't you. She's not merged with you. She's not your picture of who she is. She doesn't live inside your mind. She doesn't know what you're thinking, and you don't know what she's thinking. So you have to back off and move from reactivity to curiosity. You have to ask questions, you have to listen.”

Love, in this sense, becomes another lesson in humility. Our failure to fully understand another person doesn’t make their inner reality any less valuable. True connection requires imagination and empathy — the willingness to see others as equally real, even when they differ profoundly from us.

Schulz also weaves in philosophy: Aristophanes’ myth of love as two beings seeking to merge into one; Plato’s ideal of intellectual love between minds. Both reflect a yearning to overcome isolation — to find in another a mirror of ourselves. But being wrong about love reminds us that no one can completely close that gap.

Perhaps that’s why wrongness in love often feels like the deepest wound. And yet, it can also expand our capacity for compassion. Heartbreak forces us to accept uncertainty and to see the fragility of our own judgments. As Schulz notes elsewhere, “The ultimate apology is how you live the rest of your life.” In relationships, as in all else, being wrong offers the possibility of growth, if we’re willing to face it honestly.

After tackling the heavy terrain of error in identity and love, Schulz ends on a surprisingly uplifting note: wrongness is not only survivable, but also a source of creativity and joy.

Art provides the clearest example. Fiction thrives on error — on withheld information, surprise twists, and violated expectations. We love to be kept guessing, and even more, we love when all our guesses turn out to be wrong. Comedy, too, depends on incongruity: the mismatch between what we expect and what actually happens. As Schulz puts it, “the structure of humour is—give or take a little pleasure—the structure of error.”

This isn’t just entertainment; it’s a model for living. To embrace wrongness is to embrace disruption, reinvention, and play. Artists, Schulz writes, invite us into “the land of wrongness” where error is not shameful but pleasurable — a place to explore ambiguity, mystery, and possibility.

She draws on the concept of “negative capability”: the ability to live comfortably in uncertainty. It’s an essential ingredient in both art and life. Without it, we close ourselves off to discovery. With it, we can treat mistakes less like failures and more like adventures.

This connects back to Schulz’s most hopeful claim: all wrongness is optimism. We err because we believe — in ourselves, in the future, in the possibility that we’re right this time. Even when it leads us astray, that faith fuels our imagination and our resilience.

Being Wrong isn’t just a book about mistakes — it’s a book about being human. Kathryn Schulz takes something we usually try to avoid or deny and shows how central it is to our lives. From the moral weight we attach to error, to the way it shapes our identities and relationships, to its role in art and imagination, wrongness runs through everything we do.

What makes the book so powerful is that Schulz doesn’t stop at diagnosis. She pushes us to see error not as a weakness but as a path to growth. To admit we might be wrong is to open ourselves to empathy, to curiosity, to change. It allows us to step outside our own certainty and imagine new possibilities.

As Gandhi once put it: “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” Schulz’s message is similar: being wrong is not a detour from the human experience — it is the very road we’re on. And while it can be painful, even humiliating, it also holds the potential for joy, creativity, and renewal.

Ultimately, Being Wrong is an invitation to let go of the need for constant rightness and to embrace the humility, imagination, and optimism that come with fallibility. If we can manage that, our errors won’t just be mistakes. They’ll be opportunities — to connect, to learn, and to change our lives for the better.