It is no secret that we humans love to be right.
We try our best to convince ourselves we’ve got it right.
And to convince whoever we might be disagreeing with, that they don’t.
Even if we’re not entirely sure if we do, and they don’t.
It’s not that we deliberately lie about these things. It’s more automatic.
Kind of like a reflex, like stretching your hands out to catch yourself when you slip on ice.
As far as we are removed from the cave and the campfire, there might still be some survival value in the occasional “don’t confuse me with the facts” mentality.
A way of hiding something that might be interpreted as weakness.
But sometimes when someone disagrees with us, the need to be right can get out of hand.
Such as when someone is so frantic to win the argument, they fail to notice there are some things you are agreeing on.
Again, this desperate need to win the argument “ain’t no thinkin thing,” in the words of Trace Adkins. It’s more like a reflex, an automatic self-protection strategy humans have been engaging in for a long, long time.
One of the most common strategies, in the quest to be right at all cost, involves disagreeing with something — anything — the other guy has said, even if it doesn’t have any direct bearing on the issue being debated.
Say you’re arguing politics with an older or younger relative (these arguments usually span a couple generations, which means they may have less to do with politics than with other family issues).
You refer to something a candidate allegedly said during a speech in South Carolina.
Your relative counters that the speech was in North Carolina.
Relative 1, you 0.
(Note: no actual relatives were used in the writing of this article.)
We see a lot of this kind of behavior online. Someone reacts to a post or a news story or a blog. Someone disagrees, and pretty soon one of them is making fun of the other’s spelling, punctuation or grammar.
This isn’t always a matter of deliberate cheating, although sometimes it is. Especially if there is an audience and one person is trying to make the other one look inept.
In other cases, it seems to be less deliberate and more primal than that.
Even then, the sooner we outgrow this tendency, as a species or as individuals, the better it will be for most of us.
Because it contributes nothing to harmony among humans, although we might forgive it in an ancient cave dweller or a child.
Well, the cave dweller, at least.
But I do recall a certain fifth-grade teacher with a student who took joy in correcting her every vocabulary error.
And I hope to goodness my memory is better than hers.
Julia Cochran is a licensed professional counselor in Rincon and a psychology instructor at Armstrong State University. She can be reached at 912-772-3072 or by email at JCochranPhD@GileadCounseling.com. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Armstrong State University.