Zachary Shore (a historian by trade) is on the circuit to promote his book Blunder: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes so was on Tech Nation.

  • Mistake – a simple error (such as missing information)
  • Blunder – a solution to a problem that makes things worse than they were before
  • Cognition Trap – rigid ways of approaching and solving problems
    • Exposure Anxiety – The Fear of Being Seen as Weak
      • People in positions of power who have exposure anxiety so reinforce failure rather than work towards success
      • Men with exposure anxiety portray extremely confidence
      • Women show their exposure anxiety as being cool and quiet or with greater toughness than the men around them
    • Causefusion – Confusing the Causes of Complex Events
    • Flatview – Seeing the World in One Dimension
    • Cure-allism – Believing That One Size Really Fits All
    • Infomania – The Obsessive Relationship to Information
      • Infomisers hold onto information
      • Infovoiders refuse information contrary to their belief or from sources they don’t like
    • Mirror Imaging – Thinking the Other Side Thinks Like Us
    • Static Cling – Refusal to Accept a Changing World
  • Historians work from the end and go backwards; social science has an idea and move forward
  • People fall into cognition traps by lacking two attributes
    • Empathy
    • Imagination
  • ‘Control’ is part of the scientific process — think ‘oracle’ in the testing world
  • A cognition trap checklist could be useful pinned up in one’s workspace
  • Openness to information is critical
  • The quality of the information is irrelevant. It is the relevance of the quantity of information that counts