One thing that I really believe is that people just need to accept that they're wrong every once in a while. So when I saw Kathryn Schulz's TED Talk about being wrong, I was very interested. The overarching theme of her talk was to point out that being wrong isn't we as humans should look down upon, but instead we should accept and embrace that we are wrong sometimes and that's what makes us human... But it is also what makes life interesting. She spent most of her career studying people's mistakes, why we make them, and how people react to being wrong. The number one reaction she got was that people that being wrong was wrong in itself, it was bad. Just one example she got from the audience was that begin wrong was a "thumbs down". According to her research, people avoid being wrong as much as possible. After all, students are always striving for A+s because getting bad grades is being wrong and therefore equated with being bad and a failure. She pointed out that as long as we don't know that we are wrong, being wrong feels like being right. It is when we realize that we are wrong that we begin to feel the "thumbs down" feelings. A great analogy she used was the coyote from the Roadrunner cartoons. The coyote would run off the the edge of a cliff and just float in mid air and was completely fine... that is, until he realized he was standing on nothing. And once he made that realization, he would fall. The coyote in this story very much represents humans in our capacity to fail. That capacity is not a defect of human nature, but a defining characteristic of humans. Over all, Schulz said that in order to really discover wonder in the world, we have to look at each other, and at our mistakes and and accept that every once in a while, one might just be wrong.
Kathryn Schulz uses many techniques to keep the audience engaged in her talk. She began with a story about how she made a pretty humorous mistake in college to grab the listener's attention. There was a picture attached to explain the story further. After the cute story, she officially introduced herself, with her qualifications to be speaking, etcetera. In addition to that introduction, she more deeply introduced her talk topic. She kept up the use of storytelling throughout the talk with multiple examples in the form of stories. When she employed the use of quotes, they were prevalent and presented on the screen behind her for the audience to see. An example of that is when she presented the words "Fallor ergo sum" meaning, I err therefore I am. In addition to quotes, she uses real-life screw up situations like the BP oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico as examples of mistakes made by humans. Other real-life examples she used to bring attention to things that didn't go as planned, was Mumbarek being kicked out of office in Egypt or the prolonging of George Bush's Iraq War. These real-life situations give credibility to what Schulz is saying about the human ability to be wrong. In addition to these examples, she uses visible examples throughout the presentation, such as a visible list describing the thought process of assumptions about people who disagree with us. In the end, Kathryn Schulz presented an interesting TED Talk which captivated the listeners and presented an intriguing argument.
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