Why we make mistakes
I'm reading another popular psychology book on the human brain/cognitive error, because for some reason I find them comforting: Why We Make Mistakes by Joe Hallinan, who despite his Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting seems to be not quite as compelling a storyteller as Jonah Lehrer. Perhaps his organization of the material just isn't as good: he laundry-lists a lot of stories, instead of getting into depth and drawing connections between a few. There are several times in fact when it seems like he conspicuously fails to draw connections between stories.
For example, in one interview, a young nurse who, on the witness stand, misidentified the man who cut her face with a box cutter, now reports having ignored a niggling sense of doubt that this was the right man. Hallinan uses this as evidence that we should pay attention to our doubts. Yet only a chapter later, he explains studies that show it's generally impossible for us, when recalling our past knowledge or predictions of events, to ignore metagame information about the actual outcome. "Hindsight is foresight," as one scientist interviewed put it. In reality, it seems to me that--while the woman's misidentification of the man does exemplify some biases, such as seeing what we expect to see, or putting faith in the judgments of authority figures like the police--ignoring doubts isn't one of them; it's more likely another example of misremembering yourself to have more information than you did.
That's one example that stands out in my mind, but I feel like there are other times when he gives us enough information to point out the flaws in his own reasoning.
Still, it is a book chock-full of story and experiment descriptions, some of which I knew or head already read about (from a combination of psych classes, How We Decide, various Malcolm Gladwell books, and even the Atul Gawande book on surgery which I just read), and some of which I didn't. Also fun activities you can do yourself! For example, without looking first, can you draw a picture of the front and back of a penny?
Random other thing I learned: That nurse who was attacked worked at the hospital where I was born. I was considering throwing them some money, you know, to thank them, and also because it seems like they probably have their hands full what with all the knifing victims, but it turns out they closed last year. This is oddly sad, even though they already completed the task I really needed them for.
For example, in one interview, a young nurse who, on the witness stand, misidentified the man who cut her face with a box cutter, now reports having ignored a niggling sense of doubt that this was the right man. Hallinan uses this as evidence that we should pay attention to our doubts. Yet only a chapter later, he explains studies that show it's generally impossible for us, when recalling our past knowledge or predictions of events, to ignore metagame information about the actual outcome. "Hindsight is foresight," as one scientist interviewed put it. In reality, it seems to me that--while the woman's misidentification of the man does exemplify some biases, such as seeing what we expect to see, or putting faith in the judgments of authority figures like the police--ignoring doubts isn't one of them; it's more likely another example of misremembering yourself to have more information than you did.
That's one example that stands out in my mind, but I feel like there are other times when he gives us enough information to point out the flaws in his own reasoning.
Still, it is a book chock-full of story and experiment descriptions, some of which I knew or head already read about (from a combination of psych classes, How We Decide, various Malcolm Gladwell books, and even the Atul Gawande book on surgery which I just read), and some of which I didn't. Also fun activities you can do yourself! For example, without looking first, can you draw a picture of the front and back of a penny?
Random other thing I learned: That nurse who was attacked worked at the hospital where I was born. I was considering throwing them some money, you know, to thank them, and also because it seems like they probably have their hands full what with all the knifing victims, but it turns out they closed last year. This is oddly sad, even though they already completed the task I really needed them for.