Why we make mistakes : how we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average PDF
Preview Why we make mistakes : how we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average
WHY WE M A K E MISTAKE~ • • • • • • • • How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average • • • • • • • • Joseph T. Hallinan Broadway Books New York Copyright © 2009 by Joseph T. Hallinan All Rights Reserved Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.broadwaybooks.com BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge and credit the following for the right to reprint material in this book: Turning the Tables illustration: Turning the Tables by Roger Shepard from the book Mind Sights by Roger Shepard. Copyright © 1990 by Roger N. Shepard. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Pennies illustration based on: Cognitive Psychology 11, Raymond S. Nickerson and Marilyn Jager Adams, "Long-Term Memory for a Common Object," pp. 287-307, © 1979, with permission from Elsevier and Raymond S. Nickerson. Book design by Donna Sinisgalli Illustrations by Jackie Aher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hallinan, Joseph T. Why we make mistakes / Joseph T. Hallinan. - 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Failure (Psychology) 2. Errors. I. Title. BF575.F14H352009 153--dc22 2008030818 ISBN 978-0-7679-2805-2 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First Edition Mike's belief, and I subscribe to it myself, is that at the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars. Which means we usually make up our minds about important things far too soon and usually with poor information. But we then convince ourselves we haven't done that because (a) we know it's boneheaded, and no one wants to be accuse"d of boneheaded-ness; (b) we've ignored our vital needs and don't like to think about them; (c) deciding but believing we haven't decided gives us a secret from ourselves that's too delicious not to keep. In other words, it makes us happy to bullshit ourselves. -Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land Contents Introduction: Why Do We Make Mistakes? Because ... 1. We Look but Don't Always See 11 2. We All Search for Meaning 25 3. We Connect the Dots 43 4. We Wear Rose-Colored Glasses 56 5. We Can Walk and Chew Gum- but Not Much Else 76 6. We're in the Wrong Frame of Mind 91 7. We Skim 109 8. We Like Things Tidy 118 9. Men Shoot First 134 10. We All Think We're Above Average 149 11. We'd Rather Wing It 169 12. We Don't Constrain Ourselves 183 13. The Grass Does Look Greener 198 Conclusion 210 Acknowledgments 223 References 225 Bibliography 239 Index 275 WHY WE M A K E MISTAKE~ • • • • • • • • Introduction Why Do We Make Mistakes? Because. There are all kinds of mistakes. There's real estate you should have bought and people you shouldn't have married. There's the stock that tanked, and the job that didn't work out, and that mis guided attempt to save a few bucks by giving yourself a haircut. And then there are the errors of other people. As a newspaper reporter for more than two decades, I have made a small (and ar guably perverse) hobby of collecting stories about these, tearing out the more memorable ones and tucking them into a manila folder I had labeled "Mistakes." My favorite was torn from page 34 of my hometown paper, the Chicago Sun-Times. The story involved an incident that occurred a few years ago in the village of St. Brides, in South Wales. According to the Associated Press, a mob of vigilantes attacked and vandalized the office of a prominent children's doctor there. Why attack the office of a prominent children's doctor? Because, according to police, the vigilantes had confused the word "pediatrician"·with the word "pedophile." The doctor involved, Yvette Cloete, was forced to flee her home, which had been spray painted with the word "paedo"-an abbre-
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