It's not often that a work on psychology would serve very nicely as a Christmas stocking-filler as much as a thought-provoking work for an MBA student. However, a scrupulously researched and wonderfully entertaining analysis of why it is so very human to err is likely to tick many readers' boxes.
One of the joys of reading Joseph Hallinan's Errornomics is that it is a serious study of the science of human behaviour, but yet an irresistible treasure trove of facts, anecdotes and nuggets of popular psychology. The brainchild of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, it also gets to the heart of why we make mistakes.
Errornomics is devoted to helping prevent us from tripping up on life's banana skins. It is therefore, to a certain extent, a compendium of all the extraordinary kinds of mistakes we can make.
As a newspaper reporter for more than two decades, Hallinan has made a small hobby of collecting stories about the entertaining, bizarre or downright awful botches, hashes and blunders made by people from around the world. These range from mistakes made out of sheer ignorance to mistakes that bring us down through no fault of our own.
He noted that, when something went wrong, the cause was overwhelmingly attributed to human error. Thus, he said, 70 per cent of aircraft crashes were attributed to human error, and so were 90 per cent of car wrecks and 90 per cent of workplace accidents.
"You name it, and humans are usually to blame," Hallinan said. "And once a human is blamed, the inquiry usually stops there."
Many errors can be ascribed to systemic biases in how we see, remember and perceive the world around us, making us prone to committing certain kinds of error. For example, right-handed people tend to turn right when entering a building - even if with hindsight it appears obvious that this is not the ideal route.
Most of us - whether left-handed or right-handed - show an inordinate preference for the number seven and the colour blue and this, too, can wobble our decisions and lead us off the straight and narrow path.
"We are ... so swayed by our initial impressions of things that we are reluctant to change our first answer on a test; yet studies have shown we would be better off if we did exactly this," Hallinan said.
Our tendencies to be biased can be so entrenched that even when we do know about them, we find it hard to correct them. These tendencies can have very serious results, as we miss what we should be looking for and instead react to something we only think we can see. Because human beings are generally not wired the way they think they are, they find it difficult to function in a world that is designed as if they were.
"We are asked, for instance, to memorise countless passwords, pins and user names ... yet our memory for this type of information is lousy," Hallinan wrote. "In one test, 30 per cent of people had forgotten their passwords after just one week. In another test, after three months, at least 65 per cent of passwords were forgotten."
Is it any wonder, therefore, that it is only too easy for things to go inadvertently and sometimes dreadfully wrong? Despite his belief that it is very difficult to avoid making mistakes, Hallinan said certain steps could be taken.
While it is tough to unlearn or ignore bad information, even when we know it is wrong or should be ignored, there are a host of little things that can make a difference. Many may seem obvious, such as trying to be well rested and happy.
Sleep-deprived people show a propensity to make reckless gambles, which helps explain why many casinos are open 24 hours a day. Happiness, on the other hand, fosters well-organised thinking and flexible problem-solving, not only in touchy feely fields, such as marketing or advertising, but also in cerebral areas such as medicine.
Hallinan said it even helped to be less optimistic in making decisions. "[Most] of us tend to be overconfident, and overconfidence is a leading cause of human error," he wrote. Ultimately, however, readers should expect to gain not so much a "how to" list of easy ways to avoid making mistakes. Rather, they should look forward to enjoying an insight into the muddled, glorious and fascinating jumble of experiences that make up fallible humankind.
Five insights
- A common mistake people make isknown as a "looked but didn't see" error, writes Joseph Hallinan, author of Errornomics. When we look at something or someone, we think we can see everything there is to see. But we don't and often miss important details. Women, for example, tend to notice details of a woman whose purse is snatched, whereas men notice the thief.
- Snap judgments are hard to shake,says Hallinan. Inferences about people's competence occur within one second of being exposed to their faces - and, once made, tend to stick. Inferences based on facial appearance can predict election outcomes better than chance.
- People are notoriously bad atmultitasking. "We can walk and chew gum - but not much else," the author says. While our attention is being divided by the tasks we are trying to juggle, our minds are never able to make two conscious decisions at the same time, however simple they are. The gains we think we make by multitasking are often illusory.
- A great many day-to-day errors comeabout because we frame, or look at, an issue in the wrong way. "You've probably run into framing problems yourself and didn't even know it: ever wandered out into the parking lot at the shopping mall and stuck the right key in the wrong car?" How we frame an issue can greatly affect our response to it.
- We constantly reorganise the universeof facts available to us, Hallinan writes. How much of what we say is true? If we tell a story in a funny way, the story doesn't simply become a version of the original event - it becomes the event; it is the way we remember it.
Classified Post's Win A Book Contest
For your chance to win a copy of Errornomics, please let us know what you do to avoid making mistakes in everyday life. Send your answer to editor@classifiedpost.com, with the subject "Win A Book Contest" on or before November 20, 2009.
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