Book Reading #44: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 4Summary
Chapter 4 discusses remembering actions with rose-colored glasses. When remembering things that we do and say, we tend to make ourselves sound better than we actually are. Hallinan presents several examples: students remembering their grades as being better than they were and remembering good grades more than the bad grades, the Watergate scandal and how John Dean remembered the events entirely differently than how they really happened. He also gives the example of how gamblers remember their losses as near-wins rather than defeats .


Chapter 5
Summary
In chapter 5 Hallinan discusses the myth of multitasking. Multitasking slows us down, and can cause us to forget what we are doing and creates a need for downtime, the time it takes to refocus on a task. The author provides examples of a pilot, a bus driver and drivers in general who do other tasks (like texting, talking on the phone or fiddling with a GPS) while driving.