Excerpt from the Introduction

Keeping Current

By age thirty-five, Thomas Alva Edison stood at the peak of his career. Presidents asked to meet him. Financiers hoped to fund him. Journalists vied to quote him, desperate to report his latest breakthroughs. Tourists crowded daily in his lab, just to watch him capture human voices on a disc and hear them back again. In a time before television, his image was so recognizable that a letter sent from North Carolina bearing only a sketch of his face easily reached him in New Jersey. The mere invoking of his name suggested genius, hard work, and the American "can-do" spirit. Then, in 1882, he illuminated part of New York City with his first central power station. So many other cities requested stations of their own that his company simply lost count. Edison had become a national icon, and the future looked full of fortune. There was a problem, however, one so obvious that Edison should easily have grasped it. The world was already outgrowing the very electric system which he had helped devise. Edison's light bulbs used direct current, but only alternating current could power both tiny light bulbs and gigantic machines over vast distances. When one of Edison's star employees, a young man named Nicola Tesla, explained how they could harness alternating current and transform the way people live, Edison would have none of it. Edison had built his fame on direct current, and he could not imagine that anything more was needed. It was an exceptionally bad decision. By rejecting a new and far superior technology, Edison set the stage for Tesla to eclipse him. If mad scientists had a prototype, Nicola Tesla would be it. Nearly everything he did had to be divisible by three. He would swim twenty-seven laps each morning. He would only eat breakfast with eighteen napkins set at his place. He would count the number of steps from his lodging to his office, and if that number were not divisible by three, he would circle around the block to make the calculation fit. Certain furry things repulsed him. The thought of touching someone's hair made him queasy. The presence of a peach produced a fever. In his later years, he developed an excessive, almost romantic attachment to pigeons. Despite these traits, or perhaps because of them, his close friends like Mark Twain and Robert Underwood Johnson found him utterly endearing.ⁱ For their friendship, Tesla now and then delighted them with his laboratory magic. The tall and boyishly exuberant Serb mesmerized his visitors by sending bolts of spectral light dancing across the room. He commanded electric fireballs to engulf his body, and always emerged unscathed. Occasionally he literally shocked the onlookers by directing waves of colored currents through his guests. Mark Twain and friends were privy to a futuristic light show at a time when electricity was barely understood. But to bring his magic to the world, Tesla would have to confront the wrath of the man synonymous with electric light.

BLUNDER is a book about judgment calls. It is the story of how smart people like Edison get caught in cognition traps and wind up defeating themselves. Most complex problems have complex causes, and no single factor can explain it all. This book offers one possible explanation for why people blunder. I suggest that we all sometimes fall into "cognition traps" –rigid ways of approaching and solving problems.ⁱⁱ Cognition traps are inflexible mindsets formed from faulty reasoning. They are the stolid ways in which people approach and solve problems based on preconceived notions and preset patterns of thought. Although cognition traps are forms of faulty thinking, each rigid mindset I describe does contain a powerful emotional component. They affirm that our reason and emotions are so often intertwined. Yet as badly as our passions can muddle sober judgment, the stories of how people become caught in cognition traps do not, in fact, prove that blunders are inevitable. On the contrary, they strongly suggest that we can all make wiser decisions by cultivating empathy and imagination. As we travel through past and present examples, you'll see how true this is. BLUNDER is not a book solely about nations and wars. It shows how the same cognition traps that ensnare policymakers catch us in other realms as well. Just as cognition traps sap a nation's strength, they can sabotage personal relationships and shatter corporate competitiveness. They foil our best laid plans in nearly every arena, from international relations to romantic relations, from environmental management to health care to weight loss, and much, much more. Cognition traps are insidious, and once you finish this book, you will likely start spotting them all around you.

Throughout the stories in these pages you will meet a remarkable range of historical figures from antiquity to the present. All of them, in one way or another, have either fallen prey to crippling cognition traps, or else skillfully avoided them. And some of them have done both. What they share is not any unique vulnerability to being unconsciously hoodwinked, nor any extraordinary intellectual gifts which helped them break the destructive mental habits that afflict us all. Nonetheless, they do share certain common features. My hope is that by the end of this book, you will have a deeper grasp of the characteristics which contributed to blunders and the traits which helped to avoid them.

BLUNDER is a book about cognition, but it approaches the subject from a historian's point of view. Since historians love to tell stories, I illustrate cognition traps not solely with historical examples, but also by drawing on literature, poetry, and even a bit of clever folklore to ease us through the complex and crucial world of judgment calls.

ⁱ For more on Nicola Tesla see Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Prentice Hall, 1981), and Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. (New York: Random House, 2003. For more on Edison see Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. (New York: Crown, 2007).

ⁱⁱ Psychologists often speak of "cognitive traps" or "cognitive biases," referring to a wide range of common human responses to uncertainty. In this book I use the term "cognition trap" as a short-hand for rigid mental frameworks. I am focusing on those mindsets which I as a historian see as most frequently undermining good judgment.