Making mistakes is normal

We are human. We make mistakes. We are actually pretty good at it We have to learn how we make mistake to avoid them. Joseph Hallinan in Why we Make Mistakes: How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average, is a breezy review of many of the key behavioral biases we face in everyday life. I like looking at these books because the complexity of the human decision process is fascinating issue which has too often been assumed away through the assumption of rationality.

We look but do not see because we skim and not look for visual details. We see what we expect to see, We recall parts but not all things. We forget. We make snap judgments. We remember our successes. Hindsight isn't 20/20, but after the fact we give events higher probability. We are easily distracted. As something becomes more familiar we tend to notice less. We are all overconfident.


The world is filled with mistakes which creates the opportunities for others to succeed. The number of mistakes we make are astounding:

• 30 percent of people forget their password after one week.
• A survey of 3,000 found that 1/4 could not remember their phone number.
• Teams that wear black get penalized more often.
• Changing your answers on multiple choice tests improves results.
• 84 percent of doctors thought their colleagues were influenced by gifts. Only 16 percent thought they were influenced.
• Plane crashes by human error for no apparent reason are frequent enough to be called CFIT, Controlled Flight into Terrain
• Multitasking does not work. We are prone to distraction and find it difficult to screen out distractions.
• Quantity limits at stores boosts sales.
• The better we are the more likely we will skim which increases the chance of errors.

Hallinan provide a great number of interest stories which stick in your mind and more power to the fact we live in a less than rational world.
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