Cheryl Truman on books

Joseph Hallinan’s new book Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (Broadway Books, $24.95) is making my week.

It’s not that it’s pop culture-lite and a little something to read after you’ve digested whatever Malcolm Gladwell is on about at the moment: It’s that I’m feeling particularly stupid, and this book confirms that I am in fact right, that I have lots of company, and that conversation isn’t really about exchanging accurate information, but making your case.

The book also dissects why we don’t know what we think we know — such as passwords — and aren’t able to do the things we think define our status — such as multitask.

I have passwords on, what, 12-15 accounts, and I can remember exactly 3 of them. And one of those is Netflix. My map skills are poor, but then I’m also geographically dyslexic (don’t make fun of this designation unless you’re one of us: it’s distinctly unfunny to not be able to find your way around neighborhoods and office buildings). But as Hallinan assures us, your geographic skills, you with the innate sense of direction and GPS, aren’t that much better: Use Hallinan’s example: Is Reno east ofSan Diego? Of course it is.

Except it’s not. And the reason we think so is because we tend to straighten map lines in our head, like that little division between Nevada and California: It’s a little like the human drive noted in last year’s The Black Swan to turn human experience into narrative. We work over the facts until they make sense to us, which is not always the same thing as getting them right.

Hallinan’s book assures us that we can’t really multitask, that we’re shallow and filter our interactions through what they meant to us rather than what really happened, and that men tend to overestimate their intelligence and attractiveness. (Insert your own joke and/or objection here.)

Notes Hallinan: “Men and women not only perceive some aspects of the world differently; they often perceive themselves differently. When it comes to making mistakes, for instance, women appear to be harder on themselves than men are. For example, studies have shown that men tend to forget their mistakes more readily than women do. And mistakes appear to dog women in ways that do not bother men. In interviews …. women indicate that situations involving failure affect their self-esteem more than do situations involving success; no such difference has been reported for men.”

Really, I’d like to end this with a witty snap to the testosterone corps out there. But, as Hallinan notes, my mistakes dog me.

And we see things based on such incidental factors as whether we’re right- or left-handed. Notes Hallinan:

“Years ago, after the Hale-Bopp comet made a spectacular apeparance in the evening skies, investigators in England asked left-and right-handers if they could remember which way the comet had been facing when they saw it. Right-handers were signifcantly more likely than lefties to remember that the comet had been facing to the left. Handedness is also the best predictor of a person’s directional preference. … As a result advised the authors of one study, ‘one should look to the left when searching for the shortest lines of people at stores, banks and the like.’”