Being called out for saying nonsense is a humbling experience, both in real life and online. People generally don’t like being corrected or told that they’re wrong; on the other hand, telling someone, “I’m right, you’re wrong. Shut up,” is just as satisfying as pointing out someone’s nonsense.
But why do we care so much about being right or wrong? Making mistakes is human, and no person can be right 100% of the time, so why do we take being wrong so personally? And why do we tend to fact-check ourselves three or four times so we don’t make donkeys of ourselves?
Experts say that it has to do with how we shape and perceive our identities. We treat being right like we treat being a fan of our favorite band, sports team, or a TV show. If we’re confident and self-assured, we see ourselves as intelligent and right most of the time, inadvertently grouping ourselves with “the smart people.”
Even if we think we might be wrong, we defend ourselves vehemently. “Being right allows us to feel superior to others whereas being wrong makes us feel inferior,” psychologist Mike Brooks, Ph.D., writes for Psychology Today. “When our sense of self, our psychological projection of who we are, is being threatened, we defend — or even go on the attack. Right or wrong, win or lose, it becomes a zero-sum game.”
It doesn’t help that we tend to overestimate ourselves. However, there is one way to predict whether people will be overconfident or not. One experiment by P. Juslin, A. Winman, and P. Hansson found that people with worse short-term memory tend to be overconfident and get things wrong more often.
Another 2023 study asked participants to remember number sequences while simultaneously rating their performance. The more people had to remember, the less accurate they were in their estimations. This was true even for people with better short-term memory.
What both of these studies demonstrated was that being right can be a mentally taxing task. Sometimes, overconfidence comes from fatigue, not from arrogance. When we want to be right about something, we have to put a lot of brainpower into making sure whether we’re right or not.
The limits of what our brains can track and hold lead to us making shortcuts: we make the wrong estimations, present them confidently, and don’t want to do more work to figure out whether what we think is actually right.
