Under The Microscope

THE LOGIC OF FAILURE by Dietrich Dörner; Addison Wesley, 1997; 240 pp; US$ 15.00

Reviewed by Katrin Hille

Things tend to go wrong. Everybody knows that. But is there logic behind failure? Yes, there is, argues Dörner, a German psychologist. He should know, as he's studied failure, in real life and in simulated environments.

Dörner constructed a series of computer simulations, providing test subjects with all kind of problems: governing a small town, helping to better the life of an African tribe, regulating the temperature in a cold store. Some people failed badly. It is pleasant to look at other people's mistakes. However, the book is more than a collection of errors. Dörner analyses how we err and why bad decisions are made. Surprisingly, it is not due to obvious stupidity or a "who cares" attitude. It is not due to lack of intelligence or goodwill. It is due to "the logic of failure". Our shared imperfect human mind displays certain tendencies in our patterns of thought which make us fail. Dörner reveals the psychological forces behind the way we think.

Does that sound complicated and dry? The book is quite the opposite. It is amusing. Well entertained, the reader learns to understand mistakes and to detect pitfalls and errors in advance. However, when I finished, I was most intrigued by the fact that I had picked up a great deal about psychology and the nature of the human mind. It took more than a decade to translate this German bestseller, but it has not lost its relevance today.

Katrin Hille is a post-doctoral fellow in Canterbury's Psychology Department.