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

Book Description We forget our passwords. We pay too much to go to the gym. We think we’d be happier if we lived in California (we wouldn’t), and we think we should stick with our first answer on tests (we shouldn’t). Why do we make mistakes? And could we do a little better? We human beings have design flaws. Our eyes play tricks on us, our stories change in the retelling, and most of us are fairly sure we’re way above average. In Why We Make Mistakes , journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the captivating science of human error--how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes. In his quest to understand our imperfections, Hallinan delves into psychology, neuroscience, and economics, with forays into aviation, consumer behavior, geography, football, stock picking, and more. He discovers that some of the same qualities that make us efficient also make us error prone. We learn to move rapidly through the world, quickly recognizing patterns--but overlooking details. Which is why thirteen-year-old boys discover errors that NASA scientists miss—and why you can’t find the beer in your refrigerator. Why We Make Mistakes is enlivened by real-life stories--of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail--and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you’ve hidden something important. You’ll learn why multitasking is a bad idea, why men make errors women don’t, and why most people think San Diego is west of Reno (it’s not). Why We Make Mistakes will open your eyes to the reasons behind your mistakes--and have you vowing to do better the next time. A Q&A with Author Joseph T. Hallinan: Which Penny is Correct? (Click on Image to Enlarge) Can you pick out the real penny? (Answer Below) Question: We’ve seen pennies so many times--why is it so difficult to recognize which of these drawings accurately represents a penny? Joseph T. Hallinan: Partly, it has to do with how our memory works. Our long-term memory, even for things we’ve seen thousands of times, is limited. Most of the time, we recall meaning but not surface details. It’s the same reason we remember faces, but not the names that go with them. Q: Are there other real-world examples of this? JTH: Sure. We just watched as Chief Justice John Roberts and President Barack Obama muffed the words to the Inaugural Oath—even though the oath has only 35 words and even though both men no doubt rehearsed it many times. It’s actually very hard to remember things verbatim. Take the National Anthem, for instance. You’ve sung it hundreds of times. But how many of the Anthem’s 81 words can you remember without singing it? Q: How does this limitation lead to mistakes? JTH: Because we think our memories are much better than they are, and rely on them more than we should. Consider how many times an eyewitness has mistakenly identified a criminal and you begin to see the significance of this type of error. Basically, we look but don’t always see. Q: Alright then, we’ve waited long enough: which of the pennies above is the real McCoy? JTH: That would be penny A. But when researchers conducted this experiment, fewer than half of the people in the study picked the right one. (Photo © Andrew Collings) From Publishers Weekly A Pulitzer winner for his stories on Indiana's medical malpractice system, Hallinan has made himself an expert on the snafus of human psychology and perception used regularly (by politicians, marketers, and our own subconscious) to confuse, misinform, manipulate and equivocate. In breezy chapters, Hallinan examines 13 pitfalls that make us vulnerable to mistakes: "we look but don't always see," "we like things tidy" and "we don't constrain ourselves" among them. Each chapter takes on a different drawback, packing in an impressive range of intriguing and practical real-world examples; the chapter on overconfidence looks at horse-racing handicappers, Warren Buffet's worst deal and the secret weapon of credit card companies. He also looks at the serious consequences of multitasking and data overload on what is at best a two- or three-track mind, from deciding the best course of cancer treatment to ignoring the real factors of our unhappiness (often by focusing on minor but more easily understood details). Quizzes and puzzles give readers a sense of their own capacity for self-deception and/or delusion. A lesson in humility as much as human behavior, Hallinan's study should help readers understand their limitations and how to work with them. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* What an eye-opener! If you’re someone who has trouble remembering the names of people (or common objects), if you seem to forget things almost immediately after you learn them, if your memory of past events frequently turns out to be drastically at odds with the facts, relax: you’re not alone. It’s a truism that we all make mistakes, but Hallinan is more interested in why we make them, in what quirks of our mental makeup allow—and even frequently encourage—us to misremember important events, forget passwords, mistake strangers for friends, buy more groceries than we actually need, fall for optical illusions, and so on. Turns out these aren’t sign of illness. Just the opposite: our minds behave this way because our brains are wired this way. Hallinan cites numerous studies and experts (there is a lengthy bibliography), but he keeps the book from becoming a stodgy recitation of facts and statistics through the frequent use of illustrative examples and snappy prose. He also throws in a few big surprises, such as the revelation that multitasking is a myth (we don’t do several things at once—we switch between various tasks without really focusing on any of them). A vastly informative, and for some readers vastly reassuring, exploration of the way our minds work. --David Pitt "What an eye-opener! If you're someone who has trouble remembering the names of people (or common objects), if you seem to forget things almost immediately after you learn them, if your memory of past events frequently turns out to be drastically at odds with the facts, relax: you're not alone. It's a truism that we all make mistakes, but Hallinan is more interested in why we make them, in what quirks of our mental makeup allow—and even frequently encourage—us to misremember important events, forget passwords, mistake strangers for friends, buy more groceries than we actually need, fall for optical illusions, and so on. Turns out these aren't sign of illness. Just the opposite: our minds behave this way because our brains are wired this way. Hallinan cites numerous studies and experts (there is a lengthy bibliography), but he keeps the book from becoming a stodgy recitations of facts and statistics through the frequent use of illustrative examples and snappy prose. He also throws in a few big surprises, such as the revelation that multitasking is a myth (we don't do several things at once—we switch between various tasks without really focusing on any of them). A vastly informative, and for some readers vastly reassuring, exploration of the way our minds work." —Booklist “Entertains while it informs. Hallinan brings the science of human behavior to life, showing how it applies to us every day.”—Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things Joseph T. Hallinan , a former writer for the Wall Street Journal , is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives with his wife and children in Chicago. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 We Look but Don't Always See A man walks into a bar. The man's name is Burt Reynolds. Yes, that Burt Reynolds. Except this is early in his career, and nobody knows him yet--including a guy at the end of the bar with huge shoulders. Reynolds sits down two stools away and begins sipping a beer and tomato juice. Out of nowhere, the guy starts harassing a man and a woman seated at a table nearby. Reynolds tells him to watch his language. That's when the guy with the huge shoulders turns on Reynolds. And rather than spoil what happens next, I'll let you hear it from Burt Reynolds himself, who recounted the story years ago in an interview with Playboy magazine:I remember looking down and planting my right foot on this brass rail for leverage, and then I came around and caught him with a tremendous right to the side of the head. The punch made a ghastly sound and he just flew off the stool and landed on his back in the doorway, about 15 feet away. And it was while he was in mid-air that I saw . . . that he had no legs.Only later, as Reynolds left the bar, did he notice the man's wheelchair, which had been folded up and tucked next to the doorway.As mistakes go, punching out a guy with no legs is a lulu. But for our purposes the important part of the anatomy in this story is not the legs but the eyes. Even though Reynolds was looking right at the man he hit, he didn't see all that he needed to see. In the field of human error, this kind of mistake is so common that researchers have given it its own nickname: a "looked but didn't see" error. When we look at something--or at someone--we think we see all there is to see. But we don't. We often miss important details, like legs and wheelchairs, and sometimes much larger things, like doors and bridges. We See a Fraction of What We Think We See To understand why we do this, it helps to know something about the eye and how it works. The eye is not a camera. It does not take "pictures" of events. And it does not see everything at once. The part of the visual field that can be seen clearly at any given time is only a fraction of the total. At normal viewing distances, for instance, the area of clear vision is about the size of a quarter. The eye deals with this constraint by constantly darting about, moving and stopping roughly three times a second.What is seen as the eyes move about depends, in part, on who is doing the seeing. Men, for instance, have been shown to notice different things from those that women do. When viewing a mock purse snatching by a male thief, for instance, women tended to notice the appearance and actions of the woman whose purse was being snatched; men, on the other hand, were more accurate regarding details about the thief. Right-handed people have also been shown to remember the orientation of certain objects they have seen more accurately than left-handers do. Years ago, after the Hale-Bopp comet made a spectacular appearance in the evening skies, investigators in England asked left- and right-handers if they could remember which way the comet had been facing when they saw it. Right-handers were significantly more likely than lefties to remember that the comet had been facing to the left. Handedness is also the best predictor of a person's directional preference. When people are forced to make a turn at an intersection, right-handers, at least in the United States, prefer turning right, and lefties prefer turning left. As a result, advised the authors of one study, "one should look to the left when searching for the shortest lines of people at stores, banks and the like." The Expert's Quiet Eye In fact, what we see is, in part, a function not only of who we are but of what we are. Researchers have demonstrated that different people can view the same scene in different ways. Say you're a golfer, for instance. Even better, say you're a great golfer with a low handicap. You're playing your buddy, who's not so great. You've teed off and played through the fairway, and now it comes time to putt. Do you and your buddy look at the ball in the same way?Probably not.Why? Because experts and novices tend to look at things in different ways. One of these differences involves something known as the "quiet-eye period." This is the amount of time needed to accurately program motor responses. It occurs between the last glimpse of our target and the first twitch of our nervous system. Researchers have documented expert-novice differences in quiet-eye periods in a number of sports, ranging from shooting free throws in basketball to shooting rifles in Olympic-style competition. The consistent finding is that experts maintain a longer quiet-eye period.In the final few seconds of the putt, good golfers with low handicaps tend to gaze at the ball much longer and rarely shift their sight to the club or to any other location. Less-skilled golfers, on the other hand, don't stare at the ball very long and tend to look at their club quite often. Superior vision is so important in golf that many of the world's best players, including Tiger Woods and at least seven other PGA Tour winners, have had Lasik surgery to correct their vision, usually to twenty-fifteen or better. That means they can see clearly at twenty feet what people with twenty-twenty vision could see clearly only at fifteen feet. The sportswear giant Nike has even introduced a new putter, the IC, designed to reduce visual distractions. The shaft and the grip of the $140 putter are both green (to blend in with the color of the grass and reduce distraction), but the leading edge of the blade and the T-shaped alignment line are a blazing white, to help focus a golfer's eyes on the part of the club that contacts the ball. We Notice on a Need-to-Know Basis Regardless of whether we are experts or amateurs, even those of us with otherwise perfect vision are subject to fleeting but nonetheless startling kinds of blindness. One of the most fascinating forms is known as change blindness. It occurs when we fail to detect major changes to the scenes we are viewing during a brief visual disruption--even so brief as a blink.The profound impact of change blindness was demonstrated a decade ago in an impish experiment by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, both of them at the time at Cornell University. The design of their experiment was simple: they had "strangers" on a college campus ask pedestrians for directions. As you might suspect, the experiment involved a twist. As the stranger and the pedestrian talk, the experimenters arranged for them to be rudely interrupted by two men who pass between them while carrying a door. The interruption is brief--lasting just one second. But during that one second, something important happens. One of the men carrying the door trades places with the "stranger." When the door is gone, the pedestrian is confronted with a different person, who continues the conversation as if nothing had happened. Would the pedestrians notice that they were talking to someone new?In most cases, it turns out, the answer was no.Only seven of the fifteen pedestrians reported noticing the change. Movie Mistakes At this point, you may find it tempting to think, "I would have noticed a change like that." And maybe you would have. But consider this: you've probably seen countless similar changes and never noticed them. Where? In the movies. Movie scenes, as many people know, are not filmed sequentially; instead, they are shot in a different order from how they appear in the film, usually months or even years apart. This process often results in embarrassing mistakes known in the trade as continuity errors.Continuity errors have long bedeviled the motion picture industry. The Hollywood epic Ben-Hur is a good example. The 1959 movie, which starred the late Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur, won eleven Academy Awards--more than any other movie up to that point in history, including one for Best Picture. But it still has its share of errors, especially in the famous chariot scene, which lasts for eleven minutes but took three months to film. During the chariot race, Messala damages Ben-Hur's chariot with his saw-toothed wheel hubs. But at the end of the race, if you'll look closely, you'll see that Ben-Hur's chariot appears--undamaged! There's also a mix-up in the number of chariots. The race begins with nine chariots. During the race, six crash. That should leave three chariots at the end of the race. Instead, there are four.Hollywood employs experts who are supposed to catch these things. Officially, they are known as continuity editors or script supervisors, though they are more commonly referred to as script girls because the role, traditionally, has been filled by women. But even they can't catch all the mistakes."It's not humanly possible," says Claire Hewitt, who has supervised scripts on a variety of movies, from documentaries and short films to full-length features and even kung-fu action flicks. The best you can do in any given scene, she says, is to try to spot the most important things. But even that is easier said than done.One of Hewitt's more memorable lapses occurred in her second film as a script supervisor, a short film about a man and a woman who live next door to each other in an apartment building. Instead of filming the actors in separate rooms, though, the filmmakers cheated: they used the same room to film both actors. This required redecorating the room to make it appear in the various scenes to belong to either the man or the woman, but it saved on location costs.The error occurs in a key scene of the movie, when the woman finally meets the man. "You see her leaning against the door, listening to whether he's out in the hall, and she comes out," says Hewitt. "But the door opens the wrong way!"Hewitt never noticed the error on her own; it was instead brought to her attention by her mother's b... Read more