Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

  flying them home Air France has argued that it is inappropriate to blame pilot error as the primary cause for the crash of Flight 447. (This perspective is disputed by numerous aviation experts.) Air France was presented with a complete list of questions regarding details discussed in this chapter. The airline declined to comment on issues that fell outside of those topics discussed in the official report regarding Air France Flight 447 published by the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile, or BEA, which is the French authority responsible for investigating aviation accidents. In a statement, a spokesman for Air France wrote: “It is essential to remember that the BEA investigation report, the only official and public investigation to date, discusses and develops many of the subjects mentioned [in this chapter]. This report is available on the BEA website in English. We can only direct the journalist to this report to supplement our answers.”

  rotated responsibilities In response to questions, a spokesman for Air France noted that automation on long-haul aircraft preceded the A330 by twenty years, and that at one time “the crew included a flight engineer, who was responsible for monitoring all aircraft systems during the flight. On modern aircraft, the flight engineer has disappeared, but the requirement of monitoring aircraft systems remains. This is carried out by the pilots. Finally, now as in the past, beyond a certain flight time the crew is reinforced by one or more additional pilots to enable each pilot to take a rest period.”

  crashed after takeoff Isabel Wilkerson, “Crash Survivor’s Psychic Pain May Be the Hardest to Heal,” The New York Times, August 22, 1987; Mike Householder, “Survivor of 1987 Mich. Plane Crash Breaks Silence,” Associated Press, May 15, 2013.

  One hundred and one people Ninety-nine people were killed instantly in this crash. Two later died from complications.

  into the Everglades Ken Kaye, “Flight 401 1972 Jumbo Jet Crash Was Worst Aviation Disaster in State History,” Sun Sentinel, December 29, 1992.

  other human errors Aviation Safety Network, NTSB records.

  ascended by three thousand feet In response to questions, a spokesman for Air France wrote: “It has not been shown by the BEA that the action to pitch up is the result of the pilot’s actions faced with the rolling of the aircraft, but rather the loss of altitude read, the vertical speed on descent of 600 ft per minute, the noise, the pitch that had diminished during the seconds before etc.”

  said Bonin In response to questions, a spokesman for Air France wrote: “What is written is true, but does not throw light comprehensively on this phase because of the lack of some essential elements, such as the fact that the STALL alarm went off twice at the beginning of the incident which may have led the pilots to doubt its validity when it went off repeatedly. The BEA report stated that audio alarms are not ‘unmissable’ and that on the contrary they are often the first to be ignored.”

  watching the kids Zheng Wang and John M. Tchernev, “The ‘Myth’ of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 3 (2012): 493–513; Daniel T. Willingham, Cognition: The Thinking Animal, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2007).

  by automation Juergan Kiefer et al., “Cognitive Heuristics in Multitasking Performance,” Center of Human-Machine Systems, Technische Universität Berlin, 2014, http://​www.​prometei.​de/​fileadmin/​prometei.​de/​publikationen/​Kiefer_​eurocogsci2007.​pdf.

  automaticity and focus Barnaby Marsh et al., “Cognitive Heuristics: Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way,” in The Nature of Reasoning, eds. J. P. Leighton and R. J. Sternberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); “Human Performance,” Aerostudents, http://​aerostudents.​com/​files/​humanMachineSystems/​humanPerformance.​pdf.

  misstep can be tragic For more on this topic, I particularly recommend Martin Sarter, Ben Givens, and John P. Bruno, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Sustained Attention: Where Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up,” Brain Research Reviews 35, no. 2 (2001): 146–60; Michael I. Posner and Steven E. Petersen, “The Attention System of the Human Brain,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 13, no. 1 (1990): 25–42; Eric I. Knudsen, “Fundamental Components of Attention,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 30 (2007): 57–78; Steven E. Petersen and Michael I. Posner, “The Attention System of the Human Brain: 20 Years After,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 35 (2012): 73; Raja Parasuraman, Robert Molloy, and Indramani L. Singh, “Performance Consequences of Automation-Induced ‘Complacency,’ ” The International Journal of Aviation Psychology 3, no. 1 (1993): 1–23; Raymond S. Nickerson et al., Handbook of Applied Cognition, ed. Francis T. Durso (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007); Christopher D. Wickens, “Attention in Aviation,” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute of Aviation, Research Gate, February 1987, http://​www.​researchgate.net/​publication/​4683852_​Attention_​in_​aviation; Christopher D. Wickens, “The Psychology of Aviation Surprise: An 8 Year Update Regarding the Noticing of Black Swans,” Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, 2009.

  critical than ever before Ludwig Reinhold Geissler, “The Measurement of Attention,” The American Journal of Psychology (1909): 473–529; William A. Johnston and Steven P. Heinz, “Flexibility and Capacity Demands of Attention,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 107, no. 4 (1978): 420; Robin A. Barr, “How Do We Focus Our Attention?” The American Journal of Psychology (1981): 591–603.

  panicked attention G. R. Dirkin, “Cognitive Tunneling: Use of Visual Information Under Stress,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 56, no. 1 (1983): 191–98; David C. Foyle, Susan R. Dowell, and Becky L. Hooey, “Cognitive Tunneling in Head-Up Display (HUD) Superimposed Symbology: Effects of Information Location” (2001); Adrien Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); Steven B. Most, Brian J. Scholl, Daniel J. Simons, and Erin R. Clifford, “What You See Is What You Get: Sustained Inattentional Blindness and the Capture of Awareness,” Psychological Review 112, no. 1 (2005): 217–42; Daniel J. Simons, “Attentional Capture and Inattentional Blindness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 4 (2000): 147–55; Gustav Kuhn and Benjamin W. Tatler, “Misdirected by the Gap: The Relationship Between Inattentional Blindness and Attentional Misdirection,” Consciousness and Cognition 20, no. 2 (2011): 432–36; William J. Horrey and Christopher D. Wickens, “Examining the Impact of Cell Phone Conversations on Driving Using Meta-Analytic Techniques,” Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 48, no. 1 (2006): 196–205.

  red light ahead G. D. Logan, “An Instance Theory of Attention and Memory,” Psychological Review 109 (2002): 376–400; D. L. Strayer and F. A. Drews, “Attention,” Handbook of Applied Cognition, ed. Francis T. Durso (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007); A. D. Baddeley, “Selective Attention and Performance in Dangerous Environments,” British Journal of Psychology 63 (1972): 537–46; E. Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience (Independence, Ky.: Cengage Learning, 2014).

  of common sense In response to a fact-checking email, Strayer expanded his comments: “With automated systems, we may not focus or concentrate attention on the task—we even mind wander in boring or repetitive settings. It takes effort to concentrate attention and this can lead to high levels of mental workload and we see a ‘vigilance decrement’ where attention lapses (and we make errors and miss critical events). This is often the case with monitoring tasks (keep an eye on the autonomous system) and when things go awry we may not notice or react on autopilot (even if this is not the correct action—we refer to this as slips where autopilot took over).”

  gauges and controls Airbus, Airbus A330 Aircraft Recovery Manual Airbus, 2005, http://​www.​airbus.​com/​fileadmin/​media_​gallery/​files/​tech_​data/​ARM/​ARM_​A330_​20091101.​pdf.

  throughout the flight The automatic warning system of this A330 was programmed so that the stall warning would cease when the plane’s stall was most severe. In some
situations, when the pitch attitude was too high and the airflow into the pitot tubes too low, the computer assumed the data it was gathering was erroneous. So it sounded no alarms. Thus, a perverse situation arose for Flight 447 after the pitot tubes thawed: At times, when Bonin did something to make the stall worse, the alarm stopped. The computers worked as programmed, but the result was information that might have been confusing to the pilots.

  “reactive thinking” Koji Jimura, Maria S. Chushak, and Todd S. Braver, “Impulsivity and Self-Control During Intertemporal Decision Making Linked to the Neural Dynamics of Reward Value Representation,” The Journal of Neuroscience 33, no. 1 (2013): 344–57; Ayeley P. Tchangani, “Modeling for Reactive Control and Decision Making in Uncertain Environment,” in Control and Learning in Robotic Systems, ed. John X. Liu (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005), 21–58; Adam R. Aron, “From Reactive to Proactive and Selective Control: Developing a Richer Model for Stopping Inappropriate Responses,” Biological Psychiatry 69, no. 12 (2011): 55–68; Veit Stuphorn and Erik Emeric, “Proactive and Reactive Control by the Medial Frontal Cortex,” Frontiers in Neuroengineering 5 (2012): 9; Todd S. Braver et al., “Flexible Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Control Within Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 18 (2009): 7351–56; Todd S. Braver, “The Variable Nature of Cognitive Control: A Dual Mechanisms Framework.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 2 (2012): 106–13; Yosuke Morishima, Jiro Okuda, and Katsuyuki Sakai, “Reactive Mechanism of Cognitive Control System,” Cerebral Cortex 20, no. 11 (2010) 2675–83; Lin Zhiang and Kathleen Carley, “Proactive or Reactive: An Analysis of the Effect of Agent Style on Organizational Decision Making Performance,” Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management 2, no. 4 (1993): 271–87.

  the psychologist, in 2009 Joel M. Cooper et al., “Shifting Eyes and Thinking Hard Keep Us in Our Lanes,” Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings 53, no. 23 (2009): 1753–56. For more on this topic, please see Frank A. Drews and David L. Strayer, “Chapter 11: Cellular Phones and Driver Distraction,” in Driver Distraction: Theory, Effects, and Mitigation, ed. Michael A. Regan, John D. Lee, and Kristie L. Young (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2008): 169–90; Frank A. Drews, Monisha Pasupathi, and David L. Strayer, “Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 14, no. 4 (2008): 392; Joel M. Cooper, Nathan Medeiros-Ward, and David L. Strayer, “The Impact of Eye Movements and Cognitive Workload on Lateral Position Variability in Driving,” Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 55, no. 5 (2013): 1001–14; David B. Kaber et al., “Driver Performance Effects of Simultaneous Visual and Cognitive Distraction and Adaptation Behavior,” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour 15, no. 5 (2012): 491–501; I. J. Faulks et al., “Update on the Road Safety Benefits of Intelligent Vehicle Technologies—Research in 2008–2009,” 2010 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference, August 31–September 3, 2010, Canberra, Australia.

  announcement of any kind In a fact-checking conversation, Stephen Casner, a research psychologist at NASA, said that if a plane was falling at ten thousand–plus feet per minute, the g-force would be pretty close to 1, and as a result, it would be unlikely the passengers would have noticed that anything was amiss. However, he added, “Actually, no one knows what that feels like. Everyone who has felt what it’s like to lose 10,000 feet a minute dies pretty soon after feeling it.”

  ten thousand feet per minute In response to questions, a spokesman for Air France wrote: “A fundamental aspect is that the STALL alarm stopped when the speed fell below 60 kts, leading the pilots to think they were out of the stall. Especially that every time they pushed on the stick to try and get out of the stall situation, the STALL alarm started to work again, leading them to cancel their pitching action! Also, during the last phase, vertical speed indications were unstable, adding doubt and confusion in the pilots’ minds.”

  Dayton, near where she lived In an email sent in reply to a fact-checking inquiry, Crandall wrote: “In 1986, I began working with Dr. Gary Klein at his company Klein Associates Inc. The work you mention with firefighters and military commanders had already begun when I joined the company. It continued for many years, expanding well beyond firefighting and military command and control, and was carried out by Gary and the Klein Associates research team (who were an amazing bunch of very smart talented quirky people). I had both research and management positions at Klein Associates, and I was involved in some of those studies, not in others. As owner and Chief Scientist, Gary led our efforts to describe how (some) people are able to ‘keep their heads in chaotic environments’ and particularly how (some) people are able to make effective decisions under conditions of stress, risk, and time pressure….It is correct that in the interviews we conduct, when asked about decision making and how a person knew to do X in a particular situation, they often respond with, ‘experience’ or ‘gut feel’ or ‘intuition’ or ‘I just knew.’…These accounts of an intuitive basis for decision making became a cornerstone of our research efforts….The studies we did in the NICU confirmed what we were finding in other work domains—highly experienced, highly skilled personnel become very good at paying attention to what’s most important (the critical cues) in a given situation, and not getting distracted by less important information….Over time and repeated experience with similar situations, they learn what matters and what doesn’t. They learn to size up a situation very quickly and accurately. They see connections across various cues (clusters; packages; linkages) that form a meaningful pattern. Some people refer to this as a gestalt, and others as ‘mental models’ or schemas.” For more details, please see Beth Crandall and Karen Getchell-Reiter, “Critical Decision Method: A Technique for Eliciting Concrete Assessment Indicators from the Intuition of NICU Nurses,” Advances in Nursing Science 16, no. 1 (1993): 42–51; B. Crandall and R. Calderwood, “Clinical Assessment Skills of Experienced Neonatal Intensive Care Nurses,” Contract 1 (1989): R43; B. Crandall and V. Gamblian, “Guide to Early Sepsis Assessment in the NICU,” Instruction Manual Prepared for the Ohio Department of Development Under the Ohio SBIR Bridge Grant Program (Fairborn, Ohio: Klein Associates, 1991).