Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions [Hardcover]

Zachary Shore (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 28, 2008

We all make bad decisions. It's part of being human. The resulting mistakes can be valuable, the story goes, because we learn from them. But do we? Historian Zachary Shore says no, not always, and he has a long list of examples to prove his point.

From colonialism to globalization, from gender wars to civil wars, or any circumstance for which our best solutions backfire, Shore demonstrates how rigid thinking can subtly lead us to undermine ourselves. In the process, he identifies seven "cognition traps" to avoid. These insidious yet unavoidable mind-sets include:

-Exposure Anxiety: fear of being seen as weak

-Causefusion: confusing the causes of complex events

-Flat View: seeing the world in one dimension

-Cure-Allism: thinking that one-size solutions can solve all problems

-Infomania: an obsessive relationship to information

-Mirror Imaging: thinking the other side thinks like you do

-Static Cling: the refusal to accept that circumstances have changed

 

Drawing on examples from history, politics, business and economics, health care, even folk tales and popular culture, Shore illustrates the profound impact blunders can have. But he also emphasizes how understanding these seven simple cognition traps can help us all make wiser judgments in our daily lives.

 

For anyone whose best-laid plans have been foiled by faulty thinking, Blunder shines the penetrating spotlight of history on decision making and the patterns of thought that can lead us all astray.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shore (Breeding Bin Ladens), a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, explains why smart people do dumb things in this glib guidebook that is more pop psychology than serious inquiry. According to the author, people blunder because they fall into inflexible mind-sets formed from faulty reasoning—or cognition traps. Using examples drawn from history, wars, medicine, business and literature, Shore identifies seven common cognition traps such as causefusion (confusing the causes of complex events), flatview (black and white thinking) and static cling (an inability to accept change). Shore cites examples of various actors (individuals, corporations and even nations) stumbling into one trap or another with unfortunate results (e.g., a person will compound a blunder through different kinds of faulty reasoning). Shore points to America's Iraq debacle as a kind of perfect storm where all of the cognition traps... combined to sabotage America's success. But Shore remains optimistic that society can learn to avoid cognition traps and inevitable blunders by following his prescription of cultivating mental flexibility, empathy, imagination, contrarianism and an open mind. Despite the clever wordplay, neat categories and accessible examples, Shore mostly recycles common sense in a fancy package. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Blunder is a shrewd, smart book, full of entertaining stories and wise insights. Drawing his examples from history, literature, and current events, Zachary Shore shows how smart, well-meaning people are often trapped into making the wrong decisions. Every policy-maker should have a copy of Blunder near at hand.” —James Sheehan, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, author Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

“Engaging…[Shore] teases out the cause and effect of seven [cognition] traps (from ‘infomania’ to ‘exposure anxiety’) with witty stories of famous blunders…Beyond shining a light on our propensity to apply an old solution to a new situation, Shore’s goal is to teach the basis of good judgment. Like all good historians he’s hoping we can avoid making the same mistake twice.” —O magazine

 

"Zachary Shore explains why smart people Blunder into bad decisions." -- Vanity Fair

“Well-chosen case studies, all of which lead to a resounding climax…Eye-opening.”—Kirkus

“Shore explains why smart people do dumb things in [Blunder]… clever wordplay, neat categories and accessible examples.”  —Publishers Weekly

“Blunder is a book that will make you think about how you think. With the deft touch of a master storyteller, Zachary Shore ranges across the centuries and around the world in this eye-opening account of how our minds so often fall into cognition traps. Think Malcom Gladwell meets David McCullough. NOT reading this book would be a blunder of historic proportions.” –Eric Weiner, author of New York Times-bestseller, The Geography of Bliss

"Though most of us often make irrational choices, Zachary Shore shows that history can teach us much about our judgment.  Blunder is a clever, engaging, and thought-provoking book that can help us better understand irrationality and wisdom." —Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596912421
• ISBN-13: 978-1596912427
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great read as a history book, but not a good guide to making decisions December 3, 2008

By Edward Durney VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In Blunder, Zachary Shore takes a look at some big blunders in history. He finds a lot of them, including a few related to the recent invasion of Iraq. Those Iraq blunders have gotten a lot of press in recent years. The other stories Shore tells, though, have not. With all that new material, Shore's talent for telling stories makes the book a fascinating read.

Just a couple of comments. First, I like Shore's style. His academic credentials as a historian seem top notch. And his research seems good. Still, to me his best qualification is that he can tell a story. He must be a great teacher.

But Shore did not convince me that the lessons we can learn from his stories will help us avoid blunders. His subtitle says that Blunder will tell us "Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions." I'm not sure that the book does that.

Shore does present some theories on that score. He talks about "causefusion," his coined word for confusion about causation. He talks about "infomisering" and "infoavoiding," two more coined words for keeping too much secret and for ignoring inconvenient truths. He talks about exposure anxiety, cure-allism, flatview, mirror imaging and static cling. All these labels do tie his stories together and give the book some structure.

But for me at least, the conclusions Shore draws from his stories are a little too pat, and the categories and labels a little too gimmicky. Like parables, Shore's stories teach. But I'm not sure that, for me at least, the stories taught me the lessons that Shore meant to teach. In fact, in many cases, I'm sure they did not.

Second, when I read a book like this, I'm always curious about the author. I look at the author's picture, if there is one, and read the biography and acknowledgements. I suspect many people do, since almost all books do include some author information.

But I do not like books (other than autobiographies of course) that talk too much about the author, their family, or their own personal experiences. Even a little of that seems too much. Too narcissistic. It bothers me.

Shore did a great job of telling just enough about himself in the book to make me happy, without telling too much. He mentions toward the end of the book that he is blind. That was something that I was interested to know. I'm glad he mentioned it. But he mentioned it artfully, with a light touch, and did not mention it again. That may not matter to other readers. But it did to me.

(The story in Blunder about the man blind since three years old who had sight restored in one eye at 50 is very interesting. He could see, but at the same time he could not see. Sight needs the brain as well as the eye.)

To sum up, if you like to read history, you will probably like Blunder. I do, and I did. Shore ranges over the centuries and the continents to pick his stories. He does a good job at picking them and telling them. Blunder is well worth reading as a history.

But is the book a good guide to making decisions? For me, not really. For others, I of course cannot say. I'd be interested to see what other readers think on that question.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The Seven Blunders of the (Cognitive/Historical) World November 6, 2008

By G. Charles Steiner

Format:Hardcover

The seven blunders Zachary Shore writes about are these:

(1) Exposure Anxiety - Your need to appear strong and your fear of appearing weak makes you overcompensate and become aggressive unnecessarily; (2) Causefusion -- you confuse one cause with another or look for only one cause where there may be many; (3) Flatview - you look at life or a problem with only one lense, one dimensionality; you look at life reductively; (4) Cure-allism -- you think one size fits all, you think one solution can be applied to many different problems; (5) Infomania -- either you hold onto information or knowledge like a miser, thinking it makes you more powerful and stronger in the competition, or you avoid new information or new knowledge altogether, thinking your own information and knowledge is superior; (6) Mirror Imaging -- you think everybody thinks, feels, and behaves as you do; you don't try to see things as others may see them; and (7) Static Cling -- you refuse to accept and work with change.

What's unique about the explanation of these seven cognitive traps is that the author discusses them remarkably clearly and well and from the perspective of a historian, not from that of a self-help psychologist. All of the author's examples and illustrations of these cognitive traps come straight out of history, both ancient as well as current. While I found the historical examples always usefully illustrative and informative, I did not always find them written rivetingly. The "Infomania" chapter could have withstood shortened, less repetitive illustrations from Asian history, yet the opening chapters involving Eric Blair (George Orwell), Cleon in 427 B.C.E. Athens, Thomas Edison and Nicholas Tesla in the 20th century were fascinating and fun.

The penultimate chapter, entitled "Cognition-Trapped in Iraq" is the author's own wrap-up, critique, and final illustration of all seven cognitive traps in one stark and sad situation with Rumsfeld, Bush, Rice and Powell, et al. in Iraq.

On the back inside cover there is a handsome color photo of the author, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey (not Berkeley, as the inside jacket blurb implies). His eyes are open; his young face is smiling. Over his right shoulder and threaded through the arms folded over his chest is a long, metallic walking stick. I wondered why the author was willing to pose with such a prop. On page 224, in "Working Toward Wisdom," the last chapter, the author admits he's blind and was impressed by Mike May, a blind man who recovered his sight by making great mental efforts (with the help of surgery as well) and whose story is wonderfully told there, the kind of efforts that underscore the avoidance of the cognitive traps already discussed.

The book is meant to serve as a timely plea for smart people, i.e., leaders, and not-so-smart people, to embrace uncertainty, employ empathy and imagination, and be less caught up in reductive, monocausal thinking. One distinct weakness I found with the book was about the blunder known as "Infomania." While Mr. Shore's description and analysis of this blunder is clear and practical, realistically, it is no different from what we know of as lying and scheming.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars " 'Blunder' is a book about judgment calls." November 30, 2008

By E. Bukowsky HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"Blunder," by Zachary Shore, is one of many books that have been written in the last few years (among them "The Tipping Point," "Blink," "Predictably Irrational," "Freakonomics") that attempt to explain why human beings behave the way they do. In Shore's case, the focus is on "why smart people make bad decisions." Shore, who is a professor of national security affairs with impressive academic credentials, uses a host of anecdotes, many of which relate to military conflicts and economic matters, to illustrate his points. The book's basic premise is that even intelligent people get caught in "cognition traps" that blind them to the complexity of certain situations, leading them to act in ways that are ultimately self-defeating.

By revealing "the destructive mental patterns that we all employ," Shore hopes to help the average person to identify rigid thinking and irrational thought-patterns. If we better understand the mental traps that can ensnare the unwary, perhaps we will try to be more flexible, imaginative, and open-minded when confronting the predicaments that we all face. Instead of relying on often incorrect assumptions, we will make the necessary mental leaps that enable us to perceive an issue from another perspective, to share and use information wisely instead of hoarding it, to embrace or at least understand the changing world that we live in, and to have the self-confidence to do the right thing as we see it.

Shore entertains us with a host of anecdoes: He discusses the rivalry between Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla to bring electricity to the world; George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," in which he killed a beast unnecessarily in order to prove his strength and decisiveness; and the king of Siam made famous in the musical, "The King and I" who studied Western ways in order to bring his country into the modern era without surrendering Thailand's independence. In addition, the author examines a wide range of international confrontations, including the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Iraq War, all of which, he believes, can teach individuals and governments important life lessons.

At times, Shore is a bit repetitious and he relies too much on irritating catch-phrases, such as "causefusion," "infomania," and "cure-allism." In addition, some of his arguments are murky and unhelpful. He writes a chapter on mental illness in which he questions the use of medication for depression and states that schizophrenia may stem from root causes other than a genetic predisposition and/or chemical imbalance. First of all, it is common knowledge that the causes of mental illnesses are far from being definitively established. In addition, arguing that medication may not be the way to go is irresponsible, especially when discussing such a debilitating and potentially treatable condition as depression. Shore is on firmer ground when discussing geopolitical themes and few would argue with his conclusions about the Vietnam War, a debacle that cost many lives and weakened the United States both at home and abroad. In spite of its flaws, "Blunder" does alert us to some of the mistaken assumptions that can often lead us astray.