Why We Make Mistakes
Joseph T. Hallinan
Summary:
Chapter 0: Why Do We Make Mistakes? Because...: In this introduction to the book, Hallinan discusses how frequent mistakes are done. He claims that people more than often attribute the fault of a mistake to the person who committed the mistake, instead of anything else(the car example). He also notes that we are willing to take the bad of things in order to get the good part of it, and that the world we live in is not helping us. Hallinan claims that being aware of our acts should help us in decrease our mistakes (the multiple item sale).
Chapter 1: We Look but Don't Always See: Not being able to see (observe and catch details) of things in front of us is a cause of mistakes. Hallinan claims that we only see a fraction of what we think we are seeing, our focus is in only one thing, and what is in the background is very blurry. He also states that we notice on a Need-to-Know Basis, noticing only things that are important or relevant to us, and ignoring the rest. He discusses various experiments done that demonstrate the individual's limited eye sight.
Discussion: In the introduction of this book, Hallinan touches in some points ideas I was introduced to by the Norman books. For example, the idea that the world we are living is pushing us to commit mistakes (having to learn so many PINs and passwords; we can only remember a few things at a time) and the differentiation between mistakes and errors.
The idea that we only see part of what we think are seeing is really interesting. While reading this chapter I looked at my computer, but also tried to see what other things I could "see" in the background, but I wasn't actually paying attention too. The door experiment is really interesting, I really don't know how I would perform if I was a subject for the experiment.
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