The hiker who leaves a well-marked trail and wanders off, cross-country. The pilot who flies his perfectly maintained airplane into the ground. The kayaker who dives into a hydraulic whitewater "grinder" even though he's just seen it suck three buddies to their doom. "Gee," you think when you hear such tales, "
I'd never do something like that."
But would you? We like to think of ourselves as pretty rational, but that's hardly how we seem from the perspective of accident investigators and search-and-rescue crews.
People who deal with the aftermath of human error can tell you all too well that otherwise normal, healthy individuals are exceptionally predisposed to making the kind of mistake best described as boneheaded.
Intriguingly, research into this kind of self-defeating behavior shows that it is usually far from random. When we make mistakes, we tend to make them in ways that cluster under a few categories of screwup. There's a method to our mindlessness. Most of the time, we're on autopilot, relying on habit and time-saving rules of thumb known as heuristics.
For the most part, these rules work just fine, and when they don't, the penalty is nothing worse than a scraped knee or a bruised ego. But when the stakes are higher, when a career is in jeopardy or a life is on the line, they can lead us into mental traps from which there is no escape. One slipup leads to another, and to another, in an ever-worsening spiral. The pressure ratchets up, and our ability to make sound decisions withers.
These cognitive errors are most dangerous in a potentially lethal environment like the wilderness or the cockpit of an aircraft, but versions of them can crop up in everyday life, too, such as when making decisions about what to eat, whom to date, or how to invest. The best defense? Just knowing they exist. When you recognize yourself starting to glide into one of these mind traps, stop, take a breath, and turn on your rational brain.
1: Redlining
Mountain climbing at high altitudes is a race against time. Human endurance is severely limited in the face of extreme cold and limited oxygen, and windows of good weather can shut abruptly. Lingering too long is an invitation to disaster, so when preparing a final push to the summit, mountaineers need to set a turnaround time and strictly abide by it.
The consequence of failing to heed this sacred rule was made gruesomely manifest on May 10, 1996. On that date an unprecedented number of climbers were preparing to make the final stage of their ascent of Everest, including two commercial teams of 16 customers who had paid as much as $65,000 each to reach the top of the world. For expedition leader Rob Hall, getting his clients safely to the top and back meant abiding by a turnaround time of 2 p.m. But all morning, miscommunication slowed the climbers' progress.
The turnaround time came and went. One by one, climbers straggled to the top, briefly celebrated, then descended. Hall remained, waiting for the last of his clients to summit. Finally, at 4 p.m., the final straggler arrived, and Hall headed down. But it was too late. Already, a deadly storm system had begun to close in, lashing the mountain with hurricane-force winds and whiteout snow. Stuck on Everest's exposed face, eight climbers died, one by one. Hall was one of the last to succumb. Trapped a few hundred feet below the summit, paralyzed by the cold and a lack of oxygen, he radioed his colleagues at base camp and was patched through via satellite to his wife back home in New Zealand. "Sleep well, my sweetheart," he told her. "Please don't worry too much." Today his body remains where he sat.
Hall fell victim to a simple but insidious cognitive error common to many types of high-pressure undertakings. I call it "redlining." Anytime we plan a mission that requires us to set a safety parameter, there's a risk that in the heat of the moment we'll be tempted to overstep it. Divers see an interesting wreck or coral formation just beyond the maximum limit of their dive tables. Airplane pilots descend through clouds to their minimum safe altitude, fail to see the runway, and decide to go just a little bit lower.
It's easy to think:
I'll just go over the redline a little bit.
What difference will it make? The problem is that once we do, there are no more cues reminding us that we're heading in the wrong direction. A little bit becomes a little bit more, and at some point it becomes too much. Nothing's calling you back to the safe side.
A related phenomenon has been dubbed the "what-the-hell effect," which can occur when dieters try to control their impulses by setting hard-and-fast daily limits on their eating, a kind of nutritional redline. One day, they slip up, eat a sundae, and boom—they're over the line. "Now they're in no-man's-land," says Art Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, "so they're just going to blow the diet completely. They're going to binge."
As in mountain climbing, the best response to passing a redline is to recognize what you've done, stop, and calmly steer yourself back toward the right side. "Focus on the outcome," says Markman. "For dieters, what's important is the long-term process, not what happens on any individual day."
