UF speaker explores why you don’t always need to be right

January 11, 2011

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida Honors Program will host journalist and “wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz for a public lecture Jan. 18.

Schulz, author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Reitz Student Union. In the book, Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken, and how this attitude toward error corrodes our relationships — whether between family members, colleagues, neighbors, or nations.

Along the way, she takes us on a fascinating tour of human fallibility, from wrongful convictions to no-fault divorce, medical mistakes to misadventures at sea, failed prophecies to false memories, “I told you so!” to “Mistakes were made.”

Drawing on thinkers as varied as St. Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan and Groucho Marx, she proposes a new way of looking at wrongness. In this view, error is both a given and a gift — one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and, most profoundly, ourselves. More information is available at the book’s website http://www.beingwrongbook.com/.

The lecture is free. Books will be available for sale and Schulz will sign them after answering questions from the audience.