Interesting Human Behavior

February 10, 2012

Interview with Joseph T. Hallinan, author of the book Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average [1]

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Mike Carruthers:
Perhaps you've heard this advice - when you're taking a test and you're in doubt about the answer, go with your first answer.

Joseph T. Hallinan:
Not good advice. People have researched this question for eighty years and virtually all of the studies have reached the same conclusion - that if you think about changing your answer on a test you're probably better off changing it.
 

Joseph Hallinan, author of the book Why We Make Mistakes [1]...

And this gets back to the dilemma if you ever saw the old show Monty Hall's Let's Make a Deal. That dilemma was at the heart of that show which is, "Do you keep what you've got or do you pick what's behind door number two?" And in most cases (at least test wise) you should pick what's behind door number two.

Why are men more over-confident than women?

Nobody knows exactly why but they know pretty conclusively that they are no matter what the area is. For example if men are asked to rate their own physical attractiveness (how good-looking they are) men traditionally say they're much better looking than objective raters rate them.

If you want to make fewer mistakes get more sleep.

Sleep is a huge, huge factor in errors. In fact they did a study recently at Harvard where they looked at medical residents who worked twenty-four hour shifts and they found that when they worked twenty-four hour shifts five or more times a month, their error rates that harm patients go up seven hundred percent.

And you'll make fewer mistakes if you make a checklist before you do something.

Just last month the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that looked at hospitals around the world and said, "What happens when doctors make a pre-surgical checklist of things they need to do?" They found out that when they did that, they actually cut the surgical death rate by half.