It starts small.
Two people are arguing online about something that doesn’t really matter, or about something that matters enormously but that neither of them can control. A court ruling. A climate prediction. A sports call. It should blow over in five minutes. But one of them feels cornered. A fact lands. A gap opens. Something doesn’t quite add up.
Instead of saying, “I hadn’t considered that,” he goes personal. The argument stops being about ideas and becomes about survival. Winning matters more than truth.
Now shift scenes.
Two doctors disagree about how to treat a patient. The stakes are real. The life of a human being is on the line, and the family is waiting anxiously for two eminent professionals to figure out what the best procedure is. You would expect evidence, deliberation, professional humility.
Instead, one pulls rank. The other, boxed out and furious, walks away. The patient dies.
Different arenas. Different stakes. Same human failure.
In the heat of the moment, being wrong feels like danger. Increasingly, Americans are wired to respond to danger by hardening, not thinking.
Why is admitting you’re wrong so difficult? And why does it feel harder now than it used to?
Being Wrong Feels Like a Threat
Admitting you’re wrong is one of the hardest things a human being can do. Harder than changing your mind. Harder than apologizing. Harder than compromise. Sometimes even harder than facing physical risk. That’s because, on a biological level, the brain reads wrongness as a threat.
For most of human history, being publicly wrong meant losing status. Losing status meant losing protection. Vulnerability meant danger. We inherited a nervous system that treats correction like a predator.
So the ego reacts accordingly. It deflects. It attacks. It reframes. It does anything except surrendering ground, because surrendering feels like the annihilation of the self. It sounds silly, but it’s true; in a very real way, changing your mind is changing yourself. Psychologically healthy and strong people can handle this. Unfortunately, our society is becoming sicker and weaker, and even those who should be strong are failing at the essential logic test of admitting incorrectness.
Biology alone, however, doesn’t explain why this problem has become so acute. People are being rewarded for being wrong, not for being right. And when you reward things, you naturally get more of that thing.
America Is Becoming a Low-Trust Society
To understand why admitting error now feels intolerable, you need to understand the distinction Francis Fukuyama draws in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama’s work on high-trust and low-trust cultures was limited in scope and by the author’s own ideological blinders, but it’s pretty easy to build on his ideas and extrapolate the following.
High-trust cultures assume good faith. In these cultures, people care more about being right than looking right, because vulnerability is survivable. You can admit a mistake without losing your standing or inviting attack. Correction strengthens relationships instead of threatening them.
Low-trust cultures assume bad faith. In a low-trust culture, people care more about looking right than being right, because vulnerability is punished. Admitting error becomes a liability, something others can weaponize, a crack in the armor that invites humiliation or exclusion. Because advancement in these cultures is based more on appearance than ability, the admission of an error can be devastating.
America used to be decisively high-trust. Today we’re split between low-trust and high-trust, and the overall trajectory is unmistakably downward. Half the country still behaves as if honesty is safe. The other half treats every interaction as a potential ambush.
In a high-trust culture, being wrong feels like refinement.
In a low-trust culture, it feels like surrender.
And that shift changes everything.
The Psychology of Wrongness
Once trust erodes, the psychology locks in.
Being wrong now threatens status, identity, belonging, and safety all at once. And it’s not just a feeling; there are real consequences to admitting you are wrong. In high-trust cultures, admitting to an error and rectifying it generally adds to your status. In low-trust cultures, you may not even have the power to fix an error because it’s already in The System. The consequences can be devastating. And people internalize this as a fear of making mistakes. Instead, once a decision is made, it is perceived as immutable.
Beliefs fuse to identity. Contradiction feels like attack. Cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable.
People can either update their beliefs — which requires trust — or protect them by denying reality. In today’s environment, denial is usually cheaper.
Add social media, which turns every mistake into permanent evidence for a hostile audience, and you get a culture where doubling down feels safer than telling the truth.
Humility requires safety. Correction requires trust.
Our culture, heading into the low-trust area, has stripped both away.
Who Actually Admits They’re Wrong, and Why
A small group still finds it safer to admit errors than to continue forward with a mistake. They share one defining trait: their incentives align with reality, not appearances.
They live close to consequences.
Surgeons. Pilots. Engineers. Combat NCOs. Firefighters. Mechanics. Entrepreneurs. Field scientists who actually touch data rather than manage committees. When they’re wrong, reality answers immediately. Something breaks. Someone gets hurt. Money disappears. There is nowhere to hide.
Contrast that with bureaucracies.
Bureaucracies are designed to diffuse responsibility. Decisions belong to “policy,” “protocol,” or “the system.” Ironically, the less agency individuals have, the more insulated they are from consequences. Wrong decisions accumulate without triggering correction because no one feels personally responsible. This is how you end up with Canada’s MAID program, where medically assisted death now accounts for roughly five percent of all deaths. No single doctor carries the moral weight. Responsibility dissolves into paperwork. And because the system absorbs the blame, the threshold for approving death keeps dropping.
Worse still, once the system is implicated, admitting error becomes nearly impossible. If the system was wrong, then everyone who followed it bears responsibility. That reckoning is unbearable, so the system becomes untouchable.
Certainty replaces accountability.
The same pattern shows up elsewhere: ideology, academia, politics, and institutions that punish dissent while rewarding compliance.
We’ve built systems that punish correction and reward performance.
- Bureaucracies shield individuals from consequences.
- Ideologies treat updating as betrayal.
- Social media weaponizes humility.
- Academia drifts into dogma because orthodoxy is safer than truth.
- Language fractures until there’s no shared definition of “wrong.”
In low-trust conditions, vulnerability becomes dangerous. So people armor up. They cling harder. They fight longer. Even when the stakes are imaginary. Even when the stakes are life and death.
When a Nation Can’t Say “I Was Wrong”
High-trust societies grow because they can correct themselves.
Low-trust societies stagnate because they can’t.
When being wrong becomes more dangerous than being ignorant, you lose progress, accountability, and cohesion. You get performative certainty instead of truth. You get brittle institutions and endless conflict. You get a country full of people who would rather torch relationships, careers, and systems than say four simple words: I might be wrong.
We can’t fix this by shaming people. We fix it by rebuilding the conditions that make honesty survivable.
- Trust.
- Accountability.
- Real consequences.
- Moral frameworks that value humility.
- Leaders who can update instead of posture.
Trump’s administration is doing a pretty good job of this, holding people accountable who, at one point, must have felt untouchable because it was The System’s Fault. This needs to spread beyond just the government into business, into media, and into the way we treat each other every day. A mature culture can say, “I was wrong — now let’s get it right.”
America used to know how to do that. We’re going to need to relearn it. Fast.
