Why we make Mistakes #1
How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, & Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average !!!
And why we often “make” Mistakes, when trying to “understand” Mistakes !!!
from a book by Joseph Hallinan. Enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz 6/13
Why Mistakes? 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. As Author John Hallinan explains so brilliantly in this book, most of the most significant causes are not so obvious. 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, & perceive the world around us. 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, & insights from the book:
“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.”
“In one study, radiologists missed up to 90 percent of cancerous Tumors that, in retrospect, had been visible `for months or even years.’”
“If we are going to err at something, we would rather err by “failing” to do something.”
“It doesn’t take much to distract a driver. A two-second glance doubles the risk of an accident.”
“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.” [More Mis-takes continued in Premium Comments. Whoops, I made another Mistake. LoL]