Book Reading #44 - Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 4: We Wear Rose Colored Glasses

Summary

Chapter 4 talks about how we remember what we want to remember rather what really happened. The author calls this as wearing rose colored glasses. We tend to remember our victories and forget about our losses. In one of the examples he mentions students remembering their grades to be higher than what they really were and gamblers remembering their wins. He states that this hindsight bias is a cause of many human errors.

Discussion

This chapter provided some really interesting examples that prove how we remember good things about ourselves to make ourselves feel better. I think our ego is one of the major contributing factor towards such behavior. One of the advantages of this behavior is positive attitude since remembering our losses doesn't really help us much.

Chapter 5: We Can Walk and Chew Gum - but Not Much Else

Summary:

Walking and chewing gum at the same time refers to multi-tasking. In this chapter, the author talks about human ability to multi-task. He mentions that we are not designed to multi-task, the maximum we can do is to chew gum and walk at the same time. But doing more than one things at a time has shown that both the tasks are done clumsily due lack of concentration. Some of the examples he mentions are car accidents due to texting while driving and the airplane crash that occurred because the pilot got too bugged by a minor issue, losing his focus on flying the plane. He also mentions a term called intentional blindness by which he means that if we have something else going in our minds, we tend to not see somethings that are right in front of our eyes.

Discussion:

The examples provided in this chapter prove that we should indulge ourselves in multiple simultaneous activities, especially when one of them can potentially harm us if not done well. This chapter explains us why texting or talking on phone while driving, using the car entertainment system or entering the location in the navigation system while driving can be extremely risky. An important lesson for the designers is to design a features that disallows the usage of such devices when it detects that the car is running so that the driver is forced to stop in order to use the devices.