[SystemSafety] Floods and Electrics

[Carl Sandom]

Another good read I'd recommend on the topic of bad decision making (and justifying them post hoc) is 'Why we make mistakes' by Joseph T Hallinan. Hallinan contends that people are biased, often don't know their limitations, are prone to sticking with old strategies that work poorly in new situations, and generally a lot more irrational than we think we are.

Best Regards
Carl Sandom

On 05/01/2016 06:27, Matthew Squair wrote:
I'm reading a book by Tavris and Aronson called 'Mistakes were made (but not by me)' at the moment. Their central thesis is that reducing cognitive dissonance is a major driver in human behavior and that the mental gymnastics of self justification we use to achieve such minimisation go a long way to explaining how we persist in (very) bad decisions. The bigger the investment the stronger the effect of course and the less likely folk are to admit that they're wrong.

There are obvious implications for investment decisions in flood control measures (or other hazard controls) as well as why people seem to discount risks such as flood, bushfire, earthquake and landslide.

This may also explain why most software developers still believe that "test and fix" is preferable to "correct by construction".

Martyn
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