This is without regard to being right about something or to do actual right. It is an insistence which has no concern with a rightness of conduct. One tries to be right always, right down to the last spark. The wrongness of the action or inaction is then in conflict with one's necessity to be right. So one then may continue and repeat the wrong action to prove it is right.
All wrong actions are the result of an error followed by an insistence on having been right.
As a being goes down scale, it is harder and harder to admit having been wrong. Nay, such an admission could well be disastrous to any remaining ability or sanity. For rightness is the stuff of which survival is made. There is, fortunately, a sure way out of this web, as we shall next see. The impulse to be right lies within everyone.