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1-Page Summary of Why We Make Mistakes

Overview

Have you ever forgotten your own phone number? Or made a snap judgment about someone that wasn’t true? It’s humbling to realize how susceptible we are to error. We think of our mistakes as exceptions, but they actually stem from the way we evolved.

So, instead of blaming ourselves for our mistakes and shortcomings, we should take a closer look at the mechanisms that lead to those blunders.

In his book Why We Make Mistakes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Hallinan discusses why we make mistakes and how to deal with them. Some of the things he mentions are that baggage screeners at airports miss 25 percent of all firearms smuggled through security, one in four people can’t recall their own phone number, multitasking is actually counterproductive, and Burt Reynolds punched a man who had no legs.

Big Idea #1: Our view of the world is limited by our eyes and our minds.

Burt Reynolds entered a bar and saw someone harassing the patrons. He told him to stop, but he didn’t listen. Eventually, Burt punched him in the face and sent him flying through the air.

That’s when Reynolds realized that the man had no legs. How could he have missed that? We’re constantly confronted with more information than our brains can handle, and we see situations from different perspectives.

Part of the problem is that our field of vision is limited to 180 degrees, so we only see half of what there is to see. However, this is also a psychological problem because things appear differently to different people.

For example, when we watch an event, we sometimes notice things based on who the person is. For instance, if a male thief steals a woman’s purse, men tend to focus on the thief while women tend to focus more on the victim. Another way that our view of events can be limited is by failing to see details in what we expect and where we expect them.

Even experienced people can miss something if they aren’t looking for it. For example, baggage screeners at airports don’t expect to find guns in the luggage of passengers, so they tend to miss them when they do. A person with broad shoulders had no legs and was able to get past security because the baggage screener couldn’t see what was right in front of his eyes.

Big Idea #2: It’s much easier to remember meaningful information than random data.

A recent survey revealed that a quarter of its respondents couldn’t remember their own phone numbers. This is because we have so much information to store in our minds, and the brain can only hold so much information at any one time.

We remember meaningful information better than abstract data because of the way our brain works. For example, we can usually only memorize up to seven random items at a time—for instance, seven numbers in sequence. However, if we make those items meaningful for ourselves by grouping them into three categories or chunks, then it’s easier to remember them.

1492 – 1776 – 1945 These are important dates in history. They’re the years when Columbus sailed to America, the Declaration of Independence was signed and World War II ended.

This is true of any information you want to remember. A study found that people are better at remembering details about a person’s life if the subject matter is meaningful to them, for example they’re more likely to remember someone’s job than their name.

Why is meaningful information easier to remember than isolated data? Because learning involves making connections in the brain, and meaningful information can be processed by more areas of the brain.

For example, it’s easier to remember someone’s occupation because you can make associations with the word. For instance, if you learn that someone is a baker, images of them may come to mind such as a rotund man dressed all in white slicing bread or perhaps there are recent reports about the number of local bakeries going out of business.