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Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

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"Why We Make Mistakes" is the latest entry in a bumper crop of new books about how people make decisions. The author, Joseph Hallinan, is a former writer for the Wall Street Journal and a Pulitzer-prize winner, and his brisk style makes this book a fast and enjoyable read. Think of it as a lengthy version of an intiguing article in the WSJ, and as a perfect book to read while on a long plane flight.

Hallinan's book is essentially a survey of research into why people act the way they do. It turns out that we are biased, "poorly calibrated" (meaning, we often don't know our own limitations), very quick to judge other people on the basis of appearance alone, prone to sticking with old strategies that work poorly in new situations, and generally a lot more irrational than we think we are. "Why We Make Mistakes" is filled with interesting little oddities, such as the fact that most people have an inordinate preference for the number 7 and the color blue and the fact that our memories are typically much poorer than we realize (explaining why eye witness testimony is so unreliable).

Hallinan makes the good point that we need to understand why we make mistakes before we can do anything to prevent them. In the 1980s, for example, one out of every 5,000 people who received anesthesia died. The key to improving this outcome was to recognize that even highly trained, brilliant anesthesiologists make mistakes. At the time, two major models of machine were used to deliver anesthesia--one had a control valve that turned clockwise, another had a valve that turned counterclockwise. The profession realized that anesthesiologists could easily confuse the two machines, with disastrous results--the fix was to standardize the machines so the valve turned only one way, thus reducing the opportunity for simple human error. Then anethesiologists also took a page from the airline industry--they started using checklists to remind themselves to do important things, and they "flattened the authority gradient" by encouraging nurses and others in the operating room to point out errors. Hallinan reports that deaths due to anesthesia have declined by a factor of 40, to one death per 200,000. Some of the improvement doubtless results from changes in technology and medical knowledge, but Hallinan makes a good case that it was also very important to simply recognize that people are inherently mistake-prone and then take steps to minimize the things that can go wrong.

All of this has important implications for businesses, governments and other group activities. Organizations that brook no dissent, on the theory that the most senior people in the room will never make mistakes, are headed for disaster. As Hallinan explains, novices are often better able to spot errors than the "experts," who tend to skim over mistakes and ignore them because, ironically, the experts assume the mistakes out of the equation. Thus, the "newbie" in the room may spot the embarassing arithmetic error faster than the senior folks who wrongly assume from experience that such an error could never be made.

Organizations that understand that people will make mistakes and then do something to manage and minimize those mistakes are more likely to succeed. This is exactly what the airline industry, an enterprise that has very low tolerance for error, has done with great success. This is not to say that mistakes are no longer a problem, only that they are much rarer than they have been historically.

Other books in this genre include Cordelia Fine's "A Mind of Its Own," Zachary Shore's "Blunder," Burton's "On Being Certain," "Predictably Irrational" and "Sway." There's a lot of overlap between the various books on the subject, but each of them adds something new and interesting to the discussion. In any case, Hallinan's "Why We Make Mistakes" stands out because of its readability and because its a good survey of the topic.

A series of books has come out recently on how humans make decisions--and how quirky that decision making can be. From Gladwell's "Blink" to Fine's "A Mind of Its Own" to Lehrer's "How We Decide" to Tavris and Aronson's "Mistakes Were Made (But not by Me)." This book adds to this developing body of work.

Hallinan begins by noting that mistake has a specific dictionary meaning (Page 8): "1. a misunderstanding of the meaning or implication of something; 2. a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge or inattention." The thrust of the book is to explain why people make mistakes.

Chapter 1 is scary, to be sure. Its title is "We look but don't always see." There is the illusion on page 20 which is almost impossible to accept. Most alarmingly, though, is the tendency to quit picking things up visually after a lot of times when one doesn't see what one is looking for. Our eyes and brain just quit seriously looking for something. Key example *(showing that much is at stake here): For instance, .7% of routine mammograms are interpreted by radiologists as tumors; 99.3% of the time, radiologists don't see any sign of tumor. However, evidence suggests that radiologists are missing a lot of tumors, because their eyes and brains quit because of so many non-findings.

There are psychological processes at work, too. Framing is one of these. This is a situation in which how an issue is framed affects how we decide and behave. In situations where we stand to lose, people tend to be risk-takers; when the situation is framed as a gain, those same people become risk-averse. So, how a problem is framed (loss versus gain) fundamentally affects our decision making.

Many other types of mistakes are described as well. The book ends by laying out some ways of enhancing the quality of our decisions. One is to "think small." Identify small errors that have consequences and can be corrected. For example, about 7,000 people die each year from doctor's sloppy handwriting that is interpreted by others inaccurately. A bit of work to enhance legibility would save lives--at very small cost. Also, we need to be more self aware. People often think they're behaving rationally when, in fact, nonconscious decisions are being made. And vice versa. As the Greeks put it, "Know thyself." Finally, as one more illustration, before carrying out s decisions, ask what could go wrong (what Klein refers to as a "pre-mortem").

In the final analysis, this is a very readable book on an important subject. Well worth taking a look at.

The book has many interesting stories and research citations. Too many, in fact. Unlike other recent books that expound on these ideas (such as Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Outliers), this text simply does not have a consistent strand that draws the reader along the journey. I struggled to maintain my desire to read the book, and at times I simply had to concede that I needed to read it in small parts, like articles, in order to make it through. It's a bit of a shame, really, and I actually enjoyed looking up some of the cited articles to get a bigger picture of the research than was provided in the book.

Joseph T. Hallinan has written the perfect complement to Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink." with his "Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average." Gladwell's "Blink" is a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye, and reaching instant conclusions that are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good. But, as Hallinan writes, we must use caution as "we are all afflicted with systemic biases in the way we see, remember, and perceive the world around us, and these biases make us prone to commit certain kinds of errors." In addition, one's expectations can shape the way we see the world and our actions.

"Why We Make Mistakes" provides an inventory of biases and expectations that contribute to errors we make day-to-day. These include our personal life experience, hindsight bias, analytical bias, expert bias, systemic bias; sleep deprivation bias, context bias, age bias, a bias towards "meaning," habit, hubris and a poor understanding of our own limitations.

Hallinan provides multiple examples of how these biases and expectations play out in life - the diagnosis "miss" rate for radiologists' is in the 30% range (we see a fraction of what we see), people's names are recalled only 30% of the time (meaning matters, details don't, traits are more memorable), people preferred wine when it was in the more expensive bottles regardless of its quality (connecting the dots superficially), many are getting rich off fat people (it is a business built on hope and plays on overestimating self-control), men shoot first (overconfidence), and the recalling of stories incorrectly (our need to fit the story into our own existing ways of understanding the world).

Hallinan points out that our biggest obstacle is we just don't know (or accept) we are biased. "And some of these tendencies are so strong that even when we do know about them, we find it hard to correct for them." To help us, he provides an action plan at the end of the book which includes: think small as the tiniest change in circumstance can have big impacts on our behavior; incorporate the use of probability into our thinking, as weather forecasters do (90% chance of rain); keep tabs on our dry holes and write down decisions we made and the reasons we made them the way we did; track our success noting what was done right and what was done wrong; think negatively and ask `what could go wrong?'; let your spouse proofread; beware of the anecdote, get the facts; get adequate sleep as clears our thinking and positively affects our mood; and...work on being happy as happy people tend to be more creative and less prone to the errors induced by habit.

Hallinan's "Why We Make Mistakes" is a great read with something for everyone. It will serve as a guide when we make mistakes and will help us to understand others when they make a mistake. Purchasing this book will not be a mistake.

A very enlightening read on how the mind works. Many of the issues raised, and the studies that prove them, are covered in a number of other books covering this subject, and not much else new was revealed. It's a great primer though for those interested in the subject, and very well written. Innovative, no. Entertaining, yes.

This book covers some of the same behavioral economics territory considered in such recent books as Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, and the Bronfman brothers' Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. There is also significant overlap with Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's excellent Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.

Joseph T. Hallinan's background is in journalism, not science, so this book is primarily a synthesis of the work of others. Hallinan won a Pulitzer during his time as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, and "Why We Make Mistakes" provides ample confirmation that he has the necessary writing chops. I think he does a spectacular job of synthesizing results of the relevant research. He's an unobtrusive but authoritative guide, steering the reader through the material with admirable clarity and focus. He has a journalist's talent for providing just the information needed to get the point across, often within the framework of a funny or thought-provoking example.

Basically, Hallinan does what we hope any good nonfiction writer will do - he provides a comprehensive, coherent summary of a relatively extensive body of research, drawn from a wide variety of sources. He not only makes it accessible to the general reader; the wit and verve with which he pulls it off make the book a delight to read.

To me, the most striking part of the book was the discussion of the phenomenon of overconfidence and its consequences. Think of it as the Lake Wobegon effect - as Hallinan puts it, "we all walk around with the private conceit that we are above average, and in that conceit lies the seed of many mistakes". Some of these mistakes can be catastrophic - as for instance when the overweening confidence of a handful of self-anointed financial "masters of the universe" proceeds unchecked to the point of triggering a complete meltdown of the financial sector. (A fascinating recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong case that those executives whose errors of judgement were most instrumental in bringing about the meltdown still refuse to acknowledge that they did, in fact, make mistakes).

The potential for catastrophe is greatest in situations involving systems with a high degree of technological complexity where the price of failure is high - flying a commercial airliner, for example, or performing emergency trauma surgery. Possibly one of the most chilling results reported in the book is the percentage of survey respondents who agreed with the statement:

"Even when fatigued, I perform effectively during critical times"

Only 26% of pilots agreed. Among surgeons, the agreement rate was 70%.

Joseph T. Hallinan has written a fine book. I recommend it highly.

Frankly, until reading this book, I assumed that I understood why people make mistakes. True, several of the causes are obvious: emotional, impulsive decisions made in haste, action without sufficient knowledge, trust in unreliable sources, false assumptions or premises, and so forth. However, most people are vulnerable to basic illusions and/or delusions. (Check out the tabletops illustration devised by Roger Shepard on Page 20.) As John Hallinan explains so brilliantly in this book, most of the most significant causes are not so obvious and one of them really caught my attention: even when we know we have made a mistake, we reject that fact and often make the same mistake again. Why? Because "we are all afflicted with certain systemic biases in the way we see, remember, and perceive the world around us, and these biases make us prone to commit certain kinds of errors...we just don't know we're biased. Some of these tendencies are so strong that even when we do know about them, we find it hard [if not impossible] to correct for them." Here is a representative selection of phenomena, observations, and insights:

"Understanding the role of context is also extremely important, especially when it comes to remembering things. Memory, it turns out, is often more a reconstruction than a reproduction." (Page 9)

"In one study, radiologists missed up to 90 percent of cancerous tumors that, in retrospect, had been visible `for months or even years.'" (Page 24)

"If we are going to err at something, we would rather err by [begin italics] failing [end italics] to do something." (Page 53)

"It doesn't take much to distract a driver. A two-second glance doubles the risk of an accident." (Page 83)

Note: My first reaction to this item was "So what? What's the big deal?" Then I did a simple calculation and realized that if a car were moving at 60 mph, it would travel 176 feet in only two seconds. Hmmmm....

"As something becomes more familiar, we tend to notice less, not more. We come to see things not as they are but as (we assume) they ought to be." (Page 113)

"Events learned in one emotional state are best remembered when we are back in that happy state. Happy times, for instance, are best remembered when we're happy." (Page 117)

"We often think we're being rational when we're being visceral, and vice versa. When a mistake does happen, we often end up blaming the wrong cause." (Page 211)

"Happy people tend to be more creative problem solvers. They also make decisions more quickly, with less back-and-forth." (Page 218)

Many readers may not be aware of the neurological infrastructure of the decision-making process, notably the importance of what is generally referred to as the "unconscious mind." That is what Hallinan means when noting that many decisions are made or at least significantly influenced "outside of our consciousness." This fact helps to explain why most of us make mistakes when trying to understand why we make mistakes. Ironically, we demonstrate what we are trying to eliminate.

As indicated by hundreds of citations throughout the book supplemented by extensive References and Bibliography section (Pages 225-237 and Pages 239-273), Hallinan has obviously absorbed and digested an abundance of research data from a wide range of resources. He fully achieves his objective to explain why people make mistakes of all kinds and suggests, especially in the concluding chapter, what can be done to prevent or correct them. He urges his readers to "Think small [because] little things, as the song says, mean a lot." Also, be alert to the fact that "we don't see all that we observe, and yet we sometimes 'see' things we don't know we've seen." Therefore, beware of seeing only what you expect to see, not what is. Certain biases such as overconfidence (i.e. hubris) are amenable to correction. On occasion, it also helps to think negatively when making a decision. "What could go wrong?" Hallinan also suggests we can become less error prone by letting our spouse "proofread" our reasoning and by slowing down and sharpening the focus of our attention. "Multitasking is, for most of us, a mirage. There are strict limits to the number of things we can do at one time, and the more we do [or attempt to do], the greater the chance for error."

Many who read this last paragraph may respond, "Well, duh, that's just common sense." As Joseph Hallinan convincingly establishes in this thoroughly entertaining as well as highly informative book, it would be a serious mistake to assume that common sense is common.

* * * * *

Even publishers do not always recognize a mistake made. The dust jacket of the copy I have is a case in point. It was not trimmed to proper size nor is the photo of it displayed online by Amazon. You'd think that someone would have corrected it by now.

If you haven't heard anything at all before about behavioral psychology, and want to get started, this is a decent-good starting point book.

Or, if you have dipped a toe or two into learning about this, and want more, specifically along the lines of the book's title, it's OK.

But, if you really want to learn much about behavioral psychology, or its first cousin, behavioral economics, go to the source and read Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky or Daniel Ariely.

A rollicking good tale about human foibles.

Like a beaten boxer I was assaulted by page after page of my potential shortcomings. Yes, I admit that my memory reconstructs events. Yes, I have the male tendency to be over-confident in my judgements. Yes, I have been lost and not asked for directions (it's more difficult for Australians to locate north in the northern hemisphere!). Yes, I subscribe to belief that attack is the best form of defence. Yes, I have been distracted with gadgets while driving.

This book is a gigantic smorgasbord about how we make decisions and mistakes, and it is never boring.

Are you watching the World Cup Soccer matches? The USA Team had two goals taken away from them; the consensus is the referee calls were baseless--and wrong. How about the Major League Baseball umpire who ruined a perfect game recently? He admitted afterward that he made the wrong decision; then the league's president upheld the wrong call, denying the pitcher his rightful place in immortality--and possibly affecting his financial future. It was estimated he would lose over two hundred thousand dollars in his lifetime from lost income at baseball signing shows.

But those are games we play. What about the BP oil disaster? The question asked over and over is: How could this gross mistake happen? Wasn't anybody, even the government watchdog agency, modeling a cataclysmic deep-water event? Obviously, no one did.

Joseph T. Hallinan's "Why We Make Mistakes" sheds light on "how we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average."

Hallinan's book illuminates our mistakes--from anchor decisions to hindsight bias to framing and calibration. Are you pounding big hours at work with less than adequate sleep? Chances are you are making reckless gambles. How about overconfident? Be careful, "overconfidence is a leading cause of human error."

Not reading this fast-moving and engaging book could be one more mistake you make.