Do We Really Want to Hear Someone Say ‘I Was Wrong’?

Original source: SimoleonSense.com .

Via the Freakonomics blog on a new book, Being Wrong. Reminds me of  Soros and his acceptance of fallibility as a trader and investor.

I will be buying this book…enjoy!

Introduction (via Kathryn Schulz)

Are the most beautiful words in the English language “You’re right”?  Late last year, in an opinion piece for the Times, the writer and legal scholar Stanley Fish proposed as much, and it’s easy to see why.  Almost all of us relish being right, and we’re only too delighted when other people affirm our own sublime accuracy.

What, then of the phrase “I was wrong”?  A kind of semantic mirror image of “You’re right,” this acknowledgment seems, at first, equally likely to please.  And we certainly claim to want to hear these words more often than we do.  Whenever some sort of debacle transpires, we clamor for the responsible parties to admit their mistakes.  Regardless of the issue at hand – whether it’s an oil spill, an economic meltdown, or something far more trivial – when people blow it, we want to hear them say it.

Or so we claim.  But how do we really feel when people admit their mistakes?  When the person in question is a friend or family member, we all too often choose to rub his or her face in the mistake – while simultaneously exulting in our own rightness.  Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say “I told you so.”  The brilliance of this phrase (or its odiousness, depending on whether you are the one saying it or hearing it) derives from its admirably compact way of pointing out that 1) I was right; 2) you were wrong; and 3) I was right that you were wrong.

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