153.83 S
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Shore (Breeding Bin Ladens ), a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, explains why smart people do dumb things in this glib guidebook that is more pop psychology than serious inquiry. According to the author, people blunder because they fall into “inflexible mind-sets formed from faulty reasoning”—or “cognition traps.” Using examples drawn from history, wars, medicine, business and literature, Shore identifies seven common cognition traps such as “causefusion” (“confusing the causes of complex events”), “flatview” (black and white thinking) and “static cling” (an inability to accept change). Shore cites examples of various actors (individuals, corporations and even nations) stumbling into one trap or another with unfortunate results (e.g., a person will compound a blunder through different kinds of faulty reasoning). Shore points to “America’s Iraq debacle” as a kind of perfect storm where “all of the cognition traps... combined to sabotage America’s success.” But Shore remains optimistic that society can learn to avoid cognition traps and inevitable blunders by following his prescription of cultivating mental flexibility, empathy, imagination, contrarianism and an open mind. Despite the clever wordplay, neat categories and accessible examples, Shore mostly recycles common sense in a fancy package.
We all make bad decisions. It's part of being human. The resulting mistakes can be valuable, the story goes, because we learn from them. But do we? Historian Zachary Shore says no, not always, and he has a long list of examples to prove his point. From colonialism to globalization, from gender wars to civil wars, or any circumstance for which our best solutions backfire, Shore demonstrates how rigid thinking can subtly lead us to undermine ourselves. In the process, he identifies seven "cognition traps" to avoid. But he also emphasizes how understanding these seven simple cognition traps can help us all make wiser judgments in our daily lives. For anyone whose best-laid plans have been foiled by faulty thinking, Blunder shines the penetrating spotlight of history on decision making and the patterns of thought that can lead us all astray.
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