Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
February 2012
January 2012
- Offensive Advertising, Increased Sales?
- I Sold Out For Millions, Then Worked At McDonald's
- Steve Jobs on Failure
- The Famous Western Failure
- Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
December 2011
- It's a Wonderful Failure
- Stadium Destroyed, Reborn
- Failure to Trust the Astronauts
- Failure and the Baggy Pants Tradition
- Failure at The Happiest Place on Earth
- Saving What Was Lost
- FailureBank: A Social Learning Utility
November 2011
- A Thanksgiving Failure
- Harriet Tubman's Clever Lie
- The Failures of Lemieux
- Failed to Return a Text
- Admitting Failure
- A Leaders Job: Support Failure
October 2011
- [VIDEO] Mistakes with Tasty Dum Dums
- Failure and the Chocolate Chip Cookie
- Failure Goes Digital
- Using AIDS to Fight Cancer
- Victory Despite Obstacles
September 2011
The Problem With Facts
Mark Twain had a thing or two to say about being wrong. He writes: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
A story published in the Boston Globe describes how facts backfire. Joe Keohane explains:
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
In short: if you strongly believe something which is not true, you’re not likely to be swayed if someone presents evidence to the contrary. That sounds like tremendously bad news. After all, isn’t the people who are the most stubborn who need the most help?
Surely it’s an enormous failure to believe something which is wrong, and to refuse to change your views when you encounter information. In order to be able to accept the facts, some researchers believe the secret may be in our emotional well-being. From the article:
[Experts] worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.
A sensible degree of self-confidence helps. Get too cocky, however, and your knowledge may backfire:
A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.
So the secret to being right most of the time? Graciously admit that you may be wrong. Have enough self-esteem so that you’re not threatened by new information, but don’t be so fearful or overconfident that you become intransigent.
Mark Twain would tell you that something you “know for sure” probably “just ain’t so.” To improve we must recognize our weaknesses. Failure is the secret to success.
