Gladwell Lite: A Review of "Blunder" by Zachary Shore

Zachary Shore must have a very well-marked Malcolm Gladwell book somewhere. In “Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions,” Shore emulates the Gladwell model—recent discoveries of social science illustrated by charming stories and spiced liberally with folksy neologisms and theories.

I am a big fan of Gladwell for his compelling writing and engaging presentation of scientific research, but reading “Blunder” is like watching your cube-mate do a Dane Cook impersonation—it misses the good stuff and magnifies the weaknesses.

Like Gladwell, Shore tells a story very well, and he should be commended for a zippy delivery of engaging examples. But Shore is a historian, not a scientist, and he approaches his material with an emphasis on storytelling over scientific method. Gladwell, a journalist, has a similar bias but is more careful in his presentation of science. Shore uses a Freudian methodology, looking at cases without statistics, and is therefore subject to Freudian shortcomings: over-enthusiastic extrapolation and generalization.

Shore’s theory outlines “cognition traps” that have caused historic errors in judgment. “Cognition traps are inflexible mind-sets formed from faulty reasoning,” he writes on page 6, and each chapter outlines one of these systemic problems in thinking. The cutesy names—like causefusion, cure-allism, infomania, and static cling—are catchy, but I wondered how he came up with them.

Don’t we already have a vocabulary for discussing errors in judgment? Over-generalization, pride, paranoia, hoarding, being a Luddite—sure, they’re not as snappy as causefusion, but what does snappiness add? Shouldn't some wide-ranging survey of decision-making be employed to find out if these really are the most common cognition traps?

“When most of us want to understand cognition, we typically turn to science,” Shore admits (6). After all, scientists create taxonomies by examining thousands of cases. Scientific findings are accepted precisely because they aggregate observations.

But Shore also believes historians have been “needlessly silent.” (7) He proposes that historians have different methods available to them. “The scientist’s methods of experimentation are only one way of understanding how we think. Another way is by examining our decisions as they actually occur in real life, rather than as they unfold within the confines of carefully controlled experiments. Fortunately, history has given us a wealth of cases for learning about how we think” (7).

One might argue that looking at real world examples is already a part of science—look at case studies, efficacy versus effectiveness studies, public experiments (see D.J. Simons’ work on change blindness), and the entire field of anthropology. Real world examples are valuable, because they provide more detailed information than an experiment that controls factors. The down side of real world examples, of course, is that without the controls it is hard to tell what caused what; since there is nothing to compare a case to, you can’t know whether it was low morale, poor position, or an error in thinking that lost the battle.

Yet, well-done, the laurels can outweigh the limits. If Shore delivered what he promised, a book on cognition with the depth and context of a history, both historical and scientific discussion might be enriched. But Shore does not deliver.

Examples given are simplified and dwell on a few salient points, often dealing with complex topics shortly. The cause of school shootings, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the internal Japanese politics that led to Pearl Harbor deserve more than just a few pages.

In three pages, Shore describes the case of the Zodiac killer, a serial murderer in the Bay Area in the 1970s. “Multiple law enforcement agencies frequently failed to share critical information with each other—information that might have led to the killer’s capture” (139). This is the only sentence the reader is left with to connect a vivid description of murder to the overall theme of the book. What information? How many times? How would they have caught him? What could they do to improve their performance? Several examples, like this one, leave questions frustratingly unanswered.

Even in some extended examples, Shore fails to prove that his theory caused the blunder. Shore describes how Yosuke Matsuoka, Japan’s foreign minister, led his country to take an aggressive stance against the United States in World War II. Matsuoka hid or distorted information to make the United States seem like more of a threat, culminating in withholding a document his government wanted to send to the United States.

Yet the document actually was sent by an underling, and Matsuoka was dismissed from the cabinet. Even without Matsuoka around withholding information, Japan still bombed Pearl Harbor. It is not at all clear, at the end of Shore’s description, that it was Matsuoka—much less his particular strategy of withholding information—that led to Japanese-American conflict.

Several descriptions wound up like this; Shore assuring us that a particular thought trap ensured disaster, while questions danced like sugar plums through our heads. It is clear in most examples that, as politicians say, “Mistakes were made.” Yet I found myself asking whether it was really one of Shore’s neat categories that caused them.

Despite all the problems, it is hard for me to truly dislike this book. It is a good example of well-written non-fiction, and is worth reading for that alone. But to someone interested in science, cognition, or history, the material is a little thin. Read it with a skeptical mind, because it is all too easy to fall into a cognition trap Shore does not describe: acceptance of bad ideas well-expressed.

Why a Personal History?

I read about a group of nuns who wrote their own biographies while in their twenties. I always think of writing as an enterprise for readers, but it strikes me that these biographies might have been most important to the nuns themselves later in their lives. Like looking through pages of old essays and stories from grade school, the value is not in the content, but in the marking of the thoughts of life.

Stories are how we make sense of life and ourselves. Eric Berne's script analysis (a form of psychotherapy that has now probably blended into the more standardized, empirical methods underlying cognitive behavioral therapy and its cousins) describes how the script we believe in for our lives shapes our behavior. If I believe I'm a born loser, I likely will be. It's the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy writ large.

I feel as though my own narrative is constantly being rearranged. Contemplating every new twist in priorities, career path, and social network feels to me like restructuring the facts to tell a new story. I am constantly reinventing myself as the quiet humanitarian, nurturing those around him; the brash playboy, alarmingly charming and eminently confident; the scientist, living a life of research and observation once removed from actual production; the talent, blessed with mercurial artistic gifts that dazzle everyone into forgiveness for my shortcomings; and more.

At the end of my life, I will know which roles I have been faithful to, and which narrative best fits my life. But now I can play in them and, according to Berne, change my destiny with each story.

There's a line from a one-act play in which an eccentric woman describes herself as "much too complicated to be only one person--or even two!" A girl I was dating at the time thought the line rung true; it seemed frustratingly pat to me--like an idea someone had borrowed from a work of real quality. Now I return to it and find it cutely relevant to my own world view.

And I suppose that's why I would like to write a personal history: to mark the spiritual and intellectual places I've been, to see where I will return and where I will abandon.

Remote as it seems, moments will come when I will not remember. I will think things were always as they are--I was always an old man with a few close friends and a deep commitment to his life's work. The personal history is a testament to a time when the commitments were not made, and the choices had not been chosen. Life may seem inevitable once lived, but now, in this moment, it is fresh and mysterious, with all the possibility of unrolled dice.

I would like to think my children will one day want to read what I have written. Maybe not all of it, but maybe enough of it to understand part of who I was; enough to understand that history is lived and not written. But even if they never do--or I never have children--at some point, past many years, I will want to read it. I will want to look back and remember.

A Work Poem

Today and tomorrow and tomorrows again

Sucking and selling and unquelling yen

Office unmoments never are "when"

First Post

I have mixed feelings about blogging. On the one hand, it might encourage me to write more--and to write consistently--because I'll have a forum for sharing my thoughts. On the other hand, it goes against my instincts of privacy and self-preservation.

I've created one, so you can see how this internal debate ended, but with the caveat that I will consider this an experiment. My writing here will be writerly, not readerly, or as writerly as I can be, considering my innate impulses for explanation.