Several years ago, I was honored to be invited to speak at a "Risky Business" patient safety conference in London. One of the most memorable highlights of the trip, at least for me, was going to the Tower of London to witness a time-honored ceremony called the "Ceremony of the Keys" with the other invited speakers (I wrote about this trip a while ago in my post "Risky Business"). While we waited for the "Ceremony of the Keys" to begin, we shared a meal and a few beers with the legendary Yeoman Warders. We also had some time to talk to each other. One of the speakers there was the American author and journalist Kathryn Schulz who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for a piece she wrote in The New Yorker on the risks of a massive earthquake in the Pacific Northwest ("The Really Big One"). Schulz was giving a talk on her (at the time) newly released book, "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" (see also her TED talk "On being wrong"). I enjoyed briefly talking to her, and I really enjoyed her talk at the conference.
Well, after spending years on my list of books to read, I finally checked Being Wrong out at the local libary and sat down to read it. The book takes a little while to start getting really good, but it does in fact get really good! I have definitely learned a lot so far (I am just about three-fourths through it). First of all, did you know that about 1,200 years before the philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes stated his famous Cogito, ergo sum, meaning "I think, therefore I am"), the philosopher Saint Augustine said, Fallor, ergo sum, meaning "I err, therefore I am." There is perhaps nothing more innately human than the fact that all of us make mistakes. Saint Augustine would take it one step further and say that we are human because we make mistakes.
Schulz cites several studies in cognitive psychology that give different explanations for why we make mistakes. As it turns out, we are prone to mistakes because we are subject to a number of cognitive biases. A cognitive bias is a systematic error in our thinking that occurs when we are trying to make sense of the world around us. Our brains try to simplify all of the incoming information by taking a shortcut, if you will. The shortcut might be the right one, but occasionally it is not, and we make an error. There have been at least 180 different cognitive biases described in the literature.
Let me provide an example of one common type of cognitive bias. Answer the following riddle:
A father and son get in a car crash and are rushed to the hospital. The father dies. The boy is taken to the operating room and the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy, because he’s my son.” How is this possible?
Apparently, between 40-75% of individuals can't solve this riddle! How about you? Many of us can't get past the unconscious bias (or implicit stereotype) that the surgeon in this riddle has to be a man. We shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. Even though more women are entering medical school than men, there are still more men than women entering general surgery residency (and male surgeons already outnumbered female surgeons in the U.S.). Just to close the loop, the surgeon in the riddle is the boy's mother!
Sometimes we make errors, just because we don't pay close enough attention. Have you heard of this riddle?
A plane crashed right on the border between the U.S. and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors? In Canada or in the United States?
Did you get the answer right this time? I've seen individuals struggle with this one, at times providing me with very detailed legal explanations of why they would bury individuals in one country or the other. But of course, they don't need to bury the survivors!
Kathryn Schulz didn't actually use these two riddles in her book. Regardless, they perfectly illustrate some of the concepts that she discussed at length. I would encourage you to at least watch the TED Talk, or better yet, read her book. I hope to provide more examples from her book in future posts! For now, as these two riddles probably illustrated (unless you've seen them before), we all make mistakes. It's a part of who we are as humans - Fallor, ergo sum.
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