Book Reading #39 - Why We Make Mistakes

Title:
Chapter 0: Introduction
Chapter 1: We Look but Don’t Always See

Reference:
Hallinan, Joseph.  Why We Make Mistakes.  Random House, Inc.c New York.  2009

Summary:

Chapter 0: Introduction

The introduction gave an overview of the reasons we make mistakes.  Hallinan states that while many mistakes are the fault of humans, many are not entirely the humans' fault; we all have bias in the way we view things and this contributes greatly to the mistakes we make.  These biases operate outside our consciousness and therefore are near impossible to correct without solving a deeper problem.

One reason we make the same mistake over and over is because we assign blame to other things rather than ourselves.

The last paragraph gives an overview of what the book contains and the inspiration for the book: for all of us to learn to "walk another way".

Chapter 1: We Look but Don’t Always See

This chapter focused on the reasons we don't see things.  Our eyes only see a fraction of the whole; the eye sees about two degrees which is not very much.  The writer also points out that experts and novices see things differently in their particular field.  This further shows that it is easy for us to not see everything.

We see things on a need to know basis.  That being the case, we often use stereotypes and other forms of classification to assist us in our visual understanding of a situation.  This was shown in Simons and Levin's experiment of having a door pass between two people who were talking and replacing one of the talkers.  This was called change blindness.

Continuity errors are where for instance in a movie something is damaged earlier in the movie, but seen intact later in the movie.

When we look for things not often seen, we are less likely to see them.  When we look for things more often seen, we are more likely to see them.

Discussion:
This book sounds a lot like Norman's books.  Hopefully he will take a much different approach and not talk around in circles for the entire book.  It is interesting thinking of the reasons we make mistakes, however, I feel like we already took an adequate look at that in the Deign of Everyday Things book.

It was interesting reading about the fact shown that we see less when we expect less.  This seems to be important in so many professions and yet, as stated by the author earlier, it is almost impossible to correct for this even though we are very aware of the fact.