What it does to them

You've been counting the cost to you. There's another tab, and it's the one that decides what kind of household or team you're in.

Start with the person across from you. They watched you hold. They know you knew about the roadworks, because they saw your face at the moment you remembered, and they watched you say the roadworks were nearly finished anyway. What they've learned isn't that you're wrong about roundabouts. It's that you can't be told. Not about roundabouts, not about anything, because the thing they saw wasn't about the roundabout. So next time they have a correction for you, they weigh it. Is this worth twenty minutes? Usually it isn't. So they keep it, and the two of you settle into the topics where corrections don't come up, which is a narrower set every year.

At work it's the same and quicker. A junior colleague who watched you hold on the supplier figures has learned something about what happens when they bring figures. They'll bring fewer. The ones they do bring will come with softening, "I might have this wrong, but," which is the sound of someone protecting themselves from your holding. You'll hear less that's true and more that's careful.

With a child it's the sharpest. Children learn what being wrong means by watching what adults do when they're wrong. If they see you climb down, cleanly, and the world doesn't end, they learn that being wrong is a thing that happens and gets fixed with a sentence. If they see you hold, they learn that being wrong is a catastrophe to be defended against at all costs, and they'll defend accordingly, at seven and at seventeen. You'll then be having arguments with a teenager who won't back down, and wondering where they got it. The earlier book Not in front of the children is about putting things right with children on the same day, and the climb-down is that habit's cousin.

And there's what it does to the argument itself. A conversation where both people can be wrong out loud is a conversation that can get somewhere. It can find the roadworks and take the third exit. A conversation where one person can't is a conversation about that person, forever, whatever it's nominally about. The people around you know which kind they're in with you. The good news is that it's decided one sentence at a time, and the next sentence is yours.