Blunder cover art

Blunder

Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Blunder

By: Zachary Shore
Narrated by: Zachary Shore, Kevin Pariseau
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £18.99

Buy Now for £18.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

We all make bad decisions. It's part of being human. The resulting mistakes can be valuable, the story goes, because we learn from them. But do we? Historian Zachary Shore says no, not always, and he has a long list of examples to prove his point.

From colonialism to globalization, from gender wars to civil wars, or any circumstance for which our best solutions backfire, Shore demonstrates how rigid thinking can subtly lead us to undermine ourselves. In the process, he identifies seven "cognition traps" to avoid. These insidious yet unavoidable mind-sets include:

  • Exposure Anxiety: fear of being seen as weak
  • Causefusion: confusing the causes of complex events
  • Flat View: seeing the world in one dimension
  • Cure-Allism: thinking that one-size solutions can solve all problems
  • Infomania: an obsessive relationship to information
  • Mirror Imaging: thinking the other side thinks like you do
  • Static Cling: the refusal to accept that circumstances have changed

    Drawing on examples from history, politics, business and economics, health care, even folk tales and popular culture, Shore illustrates the profound impact blunders can have. But he also emphasizes how understanding these seven simple cognition traps can help us all make wiser judgments in our daily lives.

    For anyone whose best-laid plans have been foiled by faulty thinking, Blunder shines the penetrating spotlight of history on decision making and the patterns of thought that can lead us all astray.

  • ©2008 Zachary Shore (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
    Career Success Decision-Making & Problem Solving Personal Development Personal Success Psychology Psychology & Mental Health War Career Russia

    Listeners also enjoyed...

    The Upside of Irrationality cover art
    The Fearless Organization cover art
    48 Laws of Power cover art
    Leadership BS cover art
    The Drunkard's Walk cover art
    Our Final Invention cover art
    The Solution to Social Anxiety: Break Free from the Shyness That Holds You Back cover art
    Algorithms to Live By cover art
    A Guide to the Good Life cover art
    How Emotions Are Made cover art
    Superforecasting cover art
    The Starfish and the Spider cover art
    Standard Deviations cover art
    Brain Bugs cover art
    Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking cover art
    Virus of the Mind cover art
    No reviews yet