Making the Most of Your Mistakes

When you're learning, or trying new things, you're going to make mistakes. The trick is to try to fail in a way that gives you useful information. This week, we revisit a favorite conversation with researcher Amy Edmondson. She explains the difference between constructive failures and those we should try to avoid. Then, John Dinsmore answers listener questions about the psychology of debt, in our latest installment of Your Questions Answered.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2009, British businessman Philip Davidson Sebry was celebrating his wife's 50th birthday in the Maldives when he got a phone call. The caller asked for a business meeting the next day at 8:00 AM. Philip explained that that would be a little difficult, seeing as he was 4,500 miles away from work on vacation.

• 0:26Shankar Vedantam?

  "What are you doing away at a time like this?" the voice at the other end of the line shouted. "Your company is in liquidation."

• 0:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Philip thought it was a joke in poor taste. In an interview with Wales Online, he recalled that the caller assured him that it was no joking matter.

• 0:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Here's what happened. A British government agency had reported the demise of Philip's 134-year-old engineering company, Taylor & Sons. The government agency, known as Companies House, serves as a kind of registrar for British businesses. It said that Taylor & Sons, created in 1875, was being shut down. Turns out, a government clerk had made a typo.

• 1:13Shankar Vedantam?

  The company that was going out of business was Taylor & Son in Manchester, not Taylor & Sons in Wales.

• 1:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Philip felt sick. His company had been doing well. It had some 250 employees. Within days, he later said in that interview with Wales Online, his contracts dried up. Orders were canceled. Creditors demanded to be paid. The government agency did correct the mistake after some days, but a debt spiral had taken hold. In time, Taylor & Sons actually did go out of business.

• 1:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Not all errors are so consequential, but some are deadly and many have unpredictable effects. Wouldn't we all prefer that governments, organizations, and companies avoid making mistakes altogether?

• 2:06Shankar Vedantam?

  That's an understandable response, but it turns out that demanding no errors might be the biggest mistake of all.

• 2:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Flaws, flubs, and fallacies. This week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:35Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:06Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:38Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:11Shankar Vedantam?

  To err is human. When people work on things, mistakes are inevitable. This is true in our personal lives, in our workplaces, and at the level of public policy. Not all mistakes are created equal, though. Some failures are trivial, while others can be disastrous. At Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson studies how failures come about and what we can do about them. She has surprising insights into how organizations and people should think about the mistakes they make. Amy Edmondson, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Amy, as a young scientist working on your first major research project, you spent months collecting data from doctors and nurses at two local hospitals. The stakes here were high. I understand that you were tracking medical mistakes?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yes, we call them adverse drug events. So that is when something bad happens to a patient that is deemed caused by human error. And so I would get a phone call from one of the physicians in the study who would say, "There's just been an event, and so we're going to take a look at what happened." And so I would hop on my bike and ride down to the hospital, and I'd find myself in a conference room. And we would then sit around and hear from the perspective of different people who may have touched or been aware of the adverse event, and we'd try to truly understand what happened.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  So for instance, in one case, there was a patient that received a drug called lidocaine, and they were supposed to get a drug called heparin. Now, the two drugs were labeled similarly, and they were in the same location even though they do very different things. Now, in this case, the lidocaine would not hurt the patient, but the absence of heparin might have led to real harm. It didn't. So these adverse events didn't always involve harm, but they always involved at least the potential for harm.

• 6:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, you became aware that some teams at these hospitals were making more errors, more mistakes than others. But besides tracking mistakes, you also were examining how teams functioned, and you found that some teams functioned better than others. Tell me about the components of teamwork that you measured?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Well, I used a classic team survey called the Team Diagnostic Survey, and it measured such things as the quality of interpersonal relationships in the team, the team's own self-assessment of how well they were performing, the team's assessment of whether and the degree to which they had the resources they need to do their job well, especially interested in their assessment of the leadership of the team and how good was that leadership. And these are a set of factors that had been previously recognized as important to team effectiveness.

• 7:15Shankar Vedantam?

  And you were also looking at how much people cared about their work and whether people felt like everyone was pulling their fair share of the weight?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think that assessment is partly captured in the quality of relationships measure, but there also was the measures of their satisfaction with the work, how happy they were in their job. And all of these measures tend to travel together. So in a good team, in a well-led team, they tend to be high on all of these factors. In a not-good team, they're low on all of these factors.

• 7:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So you now have two sets of data, information on high-performing teams versus low-performing teams, and information on teams that make few mistakes or lots of mistakes. I mean, it seems quite obvious what the answer is going to be, but what was your intuition about how the quality of teams would relate to the mistakes that teams were making?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Well, my intuition was that better teamwork would lead to fewer mistakes or adverse events for patients. This just makes sense, and the more I understood about the nature of patient care in a hospital, the more I realized how interdependent it was. First of all, it's 24/7 operations, so there's shift handoffs. And second of all, most patients are seen by multiple different caregivers through the course of their stay. And so the quality of the coordination and the collaboration ought to really determine the degree to which high-quality care is given. So of course, I expected better teams would have fewer adverse events or mistakes.

• 8:59Shankar Vedantam?

  So the day comes when you're ready to analyze all of the data. You have a small computer disk with all the medication errors made by each team. Paint me a picture of what happened that day, Amy.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Well, I synced up the data on the disk with the data that I already had on the team properties in my computer and started to run the statistical analysis to connect those two data sources. And I just ran some simple correlations and I saw right away that the P value, which indicates whether or not the finding is statistically significant, I saw that the P value indicated that my data were statistically significant. So I was very excited. And then I looked more closely, leaning into the screen, and I realized that the sign was in the wrong direction.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  In other words, instead of seeing a relationship between good teamwork and low error rates, the statistical significance was saying there was a relationship between good teamwork and high error rates.

• 10:06Shankar Vedantam?

  How could that possibly be, Amy?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Well, that was my question. And I sat there, I think I froze. I was upset and I was scared. And so I sat there looking at it. And my first reaction was, I must have made a mistake. I must have put the data in incorrectly. So I walked very carefully through everything I'd done. I redid it. And nope, maybe my hypothesis had been a mistake, but I had not made a kind of data entry mistake. And so there I was, staring at it again and again, puzzled. This just can't be true. It can't be that better teams with higher quality relationships, more able and willing

• 10:50Speaker 01

  to collaborate effectively, to coordinate clearly, could have more, not fewer, adverse drug events. And I suddenly had a thought. Maybe better teams don't make more mistakes. Maybe they're more able and willing to report them. And I suddenly remembered that I had inserted an extra question that wasn't in the original survey that is stated as follows. If you make a mistake in this unit, it's held against you and it's rated on a seven-point scale from not at all to a great deal.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  And it turned out that that single item was profoundly, significantly correlated with the actual error rates. So that meant that when people agreed with this item, making a mistake would not be held against you, the error rates were higher. That's not a perfect proof, but it certainly suggested that there was something in the climate of the team that would make it easier to speak up about and report error.

• 12:01Shankar Vedantam?

  So you hired a research assistant to actually go to the hospital and observe firsthand how teams at the hospital were functioning, testing this hypothesis that better teams, in fact, were more willing to report the mistakes. And that's why they were showing up as having committed greater numbers of mistakes. What did the research assistant find?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out that I did not tell him what the survey data said, nor what the error data said. He only knew that there was a study of error going on. And I said, I just want your impression of what it's like to work in these units. I want you to observe them. I want you to interview them when they're on breaks and just learn as much as you can about these different work environments. And off he went. And after a week or so, he came back. He said, you know, they really are very different places to work. Some of them, he said, his words, were just far more open. And others, he said, again, his words, were authoritarian in nature.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  In some units, people would say things like, if you make a mistake in this unit, you get treated like a two-year-old, or you get put on trial. So you really don't want to have made one. Or the nurse manager, who is essentially the boss of the unit, if you're a nurse, would get angry and treat you badly. In other units, even though they're only maybe across the hall or up a floor or two, he found people saying things like, well, in this unit, it's really easy to talk about mistakes because of what's at stake. Patient's health is at stake. So of course, you're never afraid to speak up and you're never afraid to tell the nurse manager about what you see.

• 13:47Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering how this insight started to change your thinking about the nature of mistakes and failure, Amy.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Well, to begin with, I realized you can't learn from mistakes that aren't reported. When we think about organizations and teams and the goal of learning from mistakes and learning from failures, job one is to make sure we're actually talking about them honestly and openly.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And so that started me thinking that maybe there are differences in work environments in what I called then interpersonal climate. And if the interpersonal climate differs, that would have real implications for people's ability to learn from mistakes and failures.

• 14:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Amy was starting to see that errors and failure are not always signals of disaster and dysfunction.

• 14:42Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, why failures are not created equal, how to tell them apart, and what we should do about different kinds of failure. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:01Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect T-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

• 16:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 16:30Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When airline pilots make grave mistakes, planes crash and people can die. When surgeons make mistakes, patients can bleed out on the operating table or have the wrong limb amputated. When you leave something in the oven too long, no one dies, but you'll have to eat burnt cinders for dinner. There is a reason parents, teachers, managers, and chefs try so hard to stamp out errors. Mistakes are costly, unpleasant, and dangerous.

• 17:04Shankar Vedantam?

  At Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson studies the science of mistakes. She's discovered that we make a big mistake when we lump all failures into the same bucket.

• 17:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Amy, if you told the average leader of a company that you could completely eliminate all mistakes at her company, she would probably be ecstatic. But you say that we're making a mistake in the way we think about mistakes. Why is it problematic to try to completely eliminate all failure?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  You said it at the outset, to err is human. We are fallible human beings and we will always make mistakes. I don't mean we'll make mistakes all the time, but there is always the possibility that a mistake will occur. So a better approach is to think about how can we be set up to catch and correct mistakes before they cause harm?

• 17:57Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, from the hospital study that you were mentioning to me earlier, when you send a signal that failure is not going to be tolerated, what happens then is not that the failure stop, but that the failure stop being reported?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's one of these profound insights that I think way too few leaders or even just people in families recognize, that when you insist that we must have error-free performance or error-free lives, the main thing that happens is not that error goes away, it's that you stop hearing about it.

• 18:35Shankar Vedantam?

  There's another approach to failure. In some ways, this is the polar opposite to the first approach. And this idea is popular, or at least used to be very popular, among tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And this was to celebrate failure. Fail fast, fail early was the motto. Was this a better approach than leaders telling employees that failure was unacceptable?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I don't think it's possible to say one is better than the other. They are better for different contexts. So the fail fast, fail often is a fantastic approach for a laboratory or for an R and D group. Let's adhere to the highest possible standards and try our very best to get everything right is how we want to run an operating theater.

• 19:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Right. If you're running an airline company, I'm not sure you want to tell your pilots, fail fast, fail often.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Of course not. Imagine being the head of a factory making Toyota automobiles who decides, let's fail fast today. No, no, no, no.

• 19:42Shankar Vedantam?

  So rather than a blanket rejection of failure or a blanket embrace of failure, you say that we need to stop treating all mistakes as if they are the same. And you cite the social scientist Sim Sitkin, who once made the case for something he called intelligent failures. What are intelligent failures, Amy?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Intelligent failures are the undesired results of forays into new territory that are driven by a hypothesis and are as small as possible. And so, in a sense, an intelligent failure is an experiment that didn't produce the result you had truly wanted it to produce.

• 20:24Shankar Vedantam?

  In some ways, what that implies, then, is that intelligent failures are almost always failures that take place on the frontiers of knowledge or discovery.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yes, so there's two kinds of frontiers. One is the frontier of knowledge or discovery in that we're talking about a place where no one has been before. And the other is the frontier that's just new for you. Let's say you pick up a new hobby. You decide to take a ceramics class. That's new territory for you, and you can expect some intelligent failures along the way, even if it's not new to the world.

• 21:00Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to come back and talk at greater length about intelligent failure later in our conversation. You have a series of very useful insights into how people and organizations can use intelligent failure as an engine for growth and discovery. But it may be helpful, before we do that, to be able to spot two other kinds of failure. These are the kinds of failure we should, in fact, do our best to stamp out. Now, the first can superficially look like intelligent failure, because these failures can also take place while people are engaged in complex tasks on the frontiers of human knowledge and discovery. In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere, killing the seven astronauts aboard. You conducted an in-depth analysis of what happened to the Columbia

• 21:45Shankar Vedantam?

  when it broke apart. And it was something that you ended up calling a complex failure. Tell me the story of what happened, Amy.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Well, the shuttle had completely combusted on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003. And it was later determined that the reason for that is something called a foam strike. Now, what happens is to get the shuttle out beyond the Earth's atmosphere, it takes off with the help of a solid rocket booster. And that has the energy to bring it out into space. And that is surrounded by insulating foam. And occasionally, little bits of that insulating foam would break off just because of the pressure of the launch. And sometimes, those little bits strike the shuttle and make little dents, just little nuisance problems

• 22:37Speaker 01

  that would lead to maintenance later on to fix them up. But in this case, there was a rather large piece of foam that dislodged and hit the shuttle on a delicate spot, the leading edge of the wing. And so, it unfortunately made a larger hole, a hole the size of a human head. Now, a hole that size in the shuttle, as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, allowed all the hot gases of the atmosphere in and led to instant combustion.

• 23:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, tell me a little bit about what happened in the days leading up to the launch, because at least in retrospect, when people went back and did the investigation, they tried to follow the breadcrumbs and ask, could we have known what was going to happen before it actually happened?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Well, yes. And in this case, unlike the even more famous Challenger incident, no one had any worries leading up to the launch, which was January 16, 2003. But on January 17, the day after the launch, an engineer named Rodney Roca was looking at the launch video. And he saw just a grainy speck on the screen that bothered him, because he thought that grainy speck might be a foam strike. And the very fact that he couldn't really make out what it was, but the very fact that he could see a speck at all suggested to him that the chunk, if it were a foam strike, it might be big enough to do real damage

• 24:10Speaker 01

  rather than just create a nuisance and a maintenance problem. And so, that worried him. Now, that was about 15 days before reentry. So theoretically, NASA had 15 days to kind of figure out whether there had been a real problem and if so, whether there was an alternate plan to the simple reentry that was part of the schedule. In other words, could they find out, A, is there really a problem? And then, B, if so, is there anything we could do about it in that 15-day window? But unfortunately, Roca and his immediate colleagues were never able to get senior managers at NASA to take the problem seriously, to really believe that there was a problem.

• 24:58Shankar Vedantam?

  Was this partly because there had been other foam strikes that turned out to be fairly minimal, routine maintenance kinds of issues?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. So unfortunately, people at NASA had learned to equate the foam strikes that did happen with just maintenance. They're not a safety risk. But they had had so many of these little tiny foam strikes that they didn't think it was worth looking into.

• 25:26Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, this is sort of understandable, even though in retrospect, we know this was a mistake. I mean, if for years shuttles have been returning safely despite these foam strikes, it's quite understandable how people could have become blasé to them.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  It's completely understandable. Their own experience had taught them that it was fine. I have enormous empathy for everyone who was a part of that shuttle program, who believed it to be fine. Because I'm that way, too. I'm a fallible human being who overly trusts my prior experience and often fails to be curious enough about, well, maybe this one's different. Ooh, let me look into it. Let me see what I can learn. So it's tragic, but there are no bad guys here.

• 26:12Shankar Vedantam?

  You point out that complex failures are often not the result of one big cause, but rather a number of small factors that line up perfectly in this perfect storm, as you called it. I understand that in the healthcare arena, these kind of complex failures are sometimes called the Swiss cheese model of failure. Explain that term for me, Amy, and explain how you use this analogy to analyze a case in which a young patient received a dangerous overdose of morphine.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  That's right. And the Swiss cheese metaphor comes from an error theorist named James Reason from the UK. And he uses this metaphor of Swiss cheese to try to explain the notion of complex failures. He says, when your cheese has air bubbles in it, those are, in a sense, defects in the cheese, but they're not problematic until they line up and make a tunnel. Just rarely happens. But when it happens, then the error goes all the way through. So in the case of this morphine overdose, I was able to analyze seven factors contributing to the accident. So to begin with, there had been an overflow in the intensive care unit where most post-surgical patients go.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  And this boy had just had surgery. So he was sent to the regular medical floor, which has less specialized staff. So that's one factor. Now, that by itself would not lead to this kind of overdose. But unfortunately, there was a brand-new nurse right out of school who was assigned to take care of him. And then, there was an infusion pump that's used to deliver this pain medication. And it happened to be located in a rather dark corner, making it a little harder to see. And the nurse also hadn't done this kind of programming before, so he asked for a colleague to help. She stopped by to help, but she didn't do her calculations independently. She just looked over his shoulder and verified his.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  And then, finally, the medication label was printed badly by IT and a little difficult to read. So that contributed to them not able to determine the concentration of the drug exactly right. And so, all of those holes in the Swiss cheese lined up and let this overdose go through. Fortunately, it was noticed very quickly, and they called the physician and instantly delivered a drug to help correct the error. But it's the kind of story that is unfortunately common in healthcare, but especially in any complex system.

• 28:55Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, Amy, it points out to me the importance of allowing people to speak up about problems that they're seeing and also to take a systemic view of problems rather than looking for the smoking-gun approach to problems.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right. And our tendency is to look for that smoking gun. Like, our brains are used to looking for the single cause, the small part that broke, rather than to back up and see how the parts are relating to each other and coming together in a way that created the failure or created the flaw. And it's a discipline to sort of realize that there's multiple factors. And in order to prevent complex failures, speaking up is essential. People need to know that their voices are welcome, because all you have to do is catching, correct one of the many factors, and you've prevented the failure.

• 30:03Shankar Vedantam?

  It is possible to implement procedures that ensure that errors are caught and corrected early. Tell me how this is done by the carmaker Toyota.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Toyota is one of the best examples of doing this well, and probably the best practice that is maybe even the most famous of the Toyota production system is something called the end-on cord. And that is a literal cord that any team member is encouraged to pull whenever they see something wrong, or even more importantly, whenever they see something that might be wrong. Now, many people think, once you pull the cord, the line instantly stops. It doesn't. When you pull the cord, what happens is that a team leader comes quickly over and says, what do you see? And you explain. And the two

• 30:52Speaker 01

  of you together diagnose what's happening. And most of the time, it turns out that you can either fix it or recognize that there wasn't a real problem, and the line keeps going. But one out of 12 times, there is a real problem there, the line will stop, and it won't start again until that problem is fixed. So that prevents the complex failure of some small problem moving on downstream and we're pouring good money after bad at that point.

• 31:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Because when you stop the assembly line, when you're stopping production, it is costly. But I guess in the long run, the benefit is that the production becomes a higher quality production. And over time, you're starting to stamp out more and more mistakes.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. So yes, it's absolutely costly in the short term. If the line stops for a minute, that is literally the loss of one car sale. So you are allowing a frontline associate to cost the company several thousand dollars anytime they wish. And of course, as your question suggested, they understand that this is money well spent. This is not a cost, this is an investment. Because every time we can stamp out small problems along the way, we are less at risk for producing anything less than a perfect car with high quality that will serve that customer well for years and years.

• 32:18Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked about intelligent failures and complex failures. In some ways, at the bottom of your taxonomy of failures are what you call basic failures. You encountered one of these failures when you went sailing a few years ago. Tell me what happened, Amy.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Well, I had signed up for an alumni regatta at Harvard. And when I got there, I realized, kind of to my horror, that everybody else there was about two years out of school, not several decades as I was. But that was okay. I can do it. I'm a good sailor. You know, I'll do the best I can. So off I went. And I was thrilled to not come in dead last in the first race. After the second race, there was a break where all the boats go back to the dock before the regatta continues. The dock was dead downwind, which means that if you're in a sailboat, the boom on the sailboat, holding up the sail, is as

• 33:17Speaker 01

  far out as it can possibly go. And if you're dead downwind, and the wind shifts even just a little bit, the boom is at risk of flying over to the other side. So any experienced sailor, and I am an experienced sailor, knows that. So we all know that when you're heading dead downwind, you had better be vigilant, because you are at risk. Now, in the Charles River, where this regatta was, the wind is notoriously shifty. But the race was over, we're just heading into the shore. So I'm chatting with my crew, a little bit relaxed. And all of a sudden, the boom flies across the boat with a little wind shift, knocks

• 34:01Speaker 01

  me out. Next thing you know, I'm in the freezing cold Charles River.

• 34:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, my God. You got knocked overboard?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  I got knocked overboard. It's early May, the water is probably 40 degrees. Fortunately, my crew, who's a fantastic sailor, quickly turns the boat around to come get me. I climb in the back, the stern of the boat, and then I just see it, all the blood everywhere in the hull that's coming out of my head. So it led to nine stitches in the side of my head. And it was a basic failure. It was a small moment of inattention, looking away, not paying attention, just being overly casual, when in a sense, I'm operating dangerous machinery.

• 34:42Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, I think what I hear you say is that the situations in which we tell ourselves, you know, I can do this in my sleep, is that the situations in which basic failures can often happen.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Anytime you hear yourself or someone else saying, oh, I can do this in my sleep, watch out. You can't.

• 35:02Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that a simple tool like a checklist can be very effective when it comes to preventing basic errors. We've actually talked about the power of checklists on an earlier episode of Hidden Brain. You've pointed out, Amy, that sort of just having a checklist is not enough. You actually have to do it mindfully. And you described the story of an airland crash that took place some years ago. Tell me the story of what happened.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  So it was a freezing cold January morning in Washington, DC. And Air Florida Flight 90 was headed for Fort Lauderdale, back home, I guess. And unfortunately, they crashed into the Potomac River. Why did that happen? Well, it turns out, yes, they used the checklist. And most of our listeners are probably aware that the checklist includes the item anti-ice. When the first officer said, as part of the checklist, anti-ice, the captain said habitually, off. It's Air Florida. I think most of their flights would not be using

• 36:06Speaker 01

  the anti-ice machinery. The first officer went on to the next item on the checklist. That was a tiny, but crucial and catastrophic mistake that led to this terrible failure.

• 36:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Because in fact, you did want to de-ice the wings before taking off on that very cold day in Washington, DC.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. You wanted to de-ice the wings and take the time that is required to do that, to have a safe takeoff.

• 36:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Amy's work on how to generate fewer basic and complex failures makes sense. We all want to see fewer errors in hospitals and in space shuttle missions. When we come back, in a world where failure is generally stigmatized, how to get people and organizations to do the hard thing, systematically identify places where they can fail intelligently. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Working as a dedicated fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.

• 37:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagnes selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Amy Edmondson studies the science of failure.

• 38:31Shankar Vedantam?

  She's the author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. In her research, she has found that we make a mistake when we lump all mistakes into the same bucket. There are indeed many kinds of failure that we should actively try to stamp out. But taking an axe to all mistakes ignores the fact that some failures are actually useful. They are what Amy and her colleagues call intelligent failures.

• 38:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Amy, you found that intelligent failures happen in very specific circumstances. The first is that the failure happens in new and uncharted territory. I understand that you spoke to a prominent chemist, Jennifer Heemstra. And like many scientists, she does work on the frontiers of knowledge. I mean, she's trying to discover things that we don't know already. What did she tell you about what failure looks like in her lab?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Well, she has a wonderful way of leading her very thriving laboratory. She tells her students and young scientists, "We're going to fail all day." And she says, "Failure is a part of science." And of course, she's right. And what she means is if we are on the leading edge of our field, and that's where we hope to be, we're going to have some very smart, well-informed hypotheses. But many, if not most of them, in fact, in her view, 90% of them will end in failure. They will have been wrong. But each of those failures is in itself an important discovery. It lets them know what didn't work so that they can then quickly rethink and try the next one and hope that that might work.

• 40:08Shankar Vedantam?

  In some ways, it's like wandering around in a dark room with your arms outstretched and you're searching for the door. And each stab in the dark might not give you the door handle, but it tells you where the door handle is not. And eventually, if you make a sufficient number of failures, you're likely to eventually find the door handle.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I think that's a wonderful image. And you can take that image into so many different aspects of your life, whether that's finding a life partner or innovating in how you do your work or in the kitchen, trying a new dish. And eventually, you'll find that door handle.

• 40:44Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that blind dates are examples of intelligent failure because such failures are inherently unpredictable. What do you mean by this?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  If you are looking for a partner, particularly, let's say, a blind date, whether from a mutual friend or an app, you go out and you're going to meet someone for the first time. There's no real way to know for sure in advance whether this is going to be thumbs up or thumbs down. There is an opportunity here. You hope to meet someone and get along with them. You've done as much as you can to figure out whether this is a viable possibility. And so off you go. But if it's a failure, it's an intelligent failure.

• 41:30Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you know a couple of people in your own family who courted this kind of failure. Tell me the story of your mom, Mary, and her friend, Bill.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Well, so my mother grew up in New York City, in the same neighborhood as a boy named Bill. They were good friends. And they just stayed in touch even after they went off to college. My mother went to an all-women's college called Vassar. Bill was then an all-male college called Princeton. And he had a friend named Frank. And he said, "Bill thought it would be fun for my mother to come down on one of these weekends that were organized with dances and so forth." And he said, "Mary, why don't you come? I think you'll like this guy." So my mother came and spent the whole weekend at Princeton. And she had a terrible time. She didn't like him one bit. He drank too much.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  He was too forward. She wished she had stayed home at Vassar doing her homework. So it was a failure. It might not have been intelligent, but it was a failure.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Then, fast forward a year or so, and Bill says, "I have a friend I want you to meet." And she's thinking, "No way." And he says, "No, really. I really think you're going to like this guy. He's the brother of a woman I'm dating, and I really, really want you to meet him." And my mother, probably intuiting the strategy of small losses, agreed to meet this other guy for a drink. Not a weekend away, but a drink. And lo and behold, this new guy named Bob and Mary hit it off right away. Really liked each other, had a great deal in common, and they ultimately married. And those are my parents.

• 43:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 43:26Shankar Vedantam?

  And you can see how the intelligent failure in the first date, in some ways, prompted your mom to do something very smart in the second date, which is to limit the size of the potential failure. So instead of spending a whole weekend with Bob, she met Bob for a drink. Can you talk about how this is also one of the markers of intelligent failure, which is you try to make the failure as small as you possibly can?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  It's so important that we minimize the waste. It's how much time, how many resources? How much of an investment do you have to make in an unknown outcome to get the information you need to then go forward?

• 44:07Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, in a non-personal domain, you can see how organizations might be able to put this insight into practice. If you're training pilots, for example, maybe the smart thing is not to put them in a plane on day one, but to put them in a simulator.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. Don't give them 200 living passengers who are depending on their skill to land the plane safely. Put them in simulator. And in fact, you can give them all sorts of incredibly challenging scenarios and see how they do.

• 44:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you think of any other domains, Amy, where organizations can try and help people fail, but fail small rather than fail big?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Well, in every organization, the research and development group is trying to develop new products and services that will, in the future, be the source of revenue. And you have experiments. You say, "Well, maybe this will work. Maybe they'll like this. Maybe this technology will work." And more often than not, you're having failures. But you're mitigating the risk of customers thinking badly of you because you're having a failure, because you're having it in the R&D department, not out in the marketplace.

• 45:18Shankar Vedantam?

  A third marker of intelligent failure is that we have a very clear goal in mind. And a vivid example of this comes from the inventor, Thomas Edison. Tell me about his intelligent failure, or rather, his intelligent failures, Amy.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Thomas Edison was dogged in his pursuit of the inventions that he knew or he believed were possible and he knew could really change lives. So he's, of course, credited with inventing the incandescent light bulb. And he tried literally thousands of different materials and techniques that, one after another, they didn't work. They had all sorts of problems. But he didn't give up. He just kept going. And when a lab assistant, I think, attempting to be supportive, said, "Gosh, all these failures must be very hard for you, sir," he responded, "Failures? I haven't failed.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work."

• 46:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, so this is the very definition of intelligent failure here.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he completely understood the concept of intelligent failure. You have a goal. You've done your homework. You've used the knowledge you have from your prior experiences, from available literature, from everything you can get your hands on. And then you reach that point where there is no way to go forward other than by trying it out, acting, having an experiment. And then, lo and behold, again, you were wrong. But fortunately, you're wrong behind closed doors or you're wrong at a small scale. You haven't caused real harm. You haven't blown anything up.

• 47:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Another factor involved in intelligent failures is something you alluded to a second ago, Amy. And that is that we have done our homework. What does this term mean?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Well, it means different things in different contexts. If you're a scientist hoping to make an important discovery and publish in a journal, it's about being up to date on the most recent research so that you're really in new territory. If you're going on a blind date with a friend of a friend, you have asked that friend, "Well, tell me about this person. What do they like to do?" You've found it as much as you can before agreeing to go spend time with them.

• 47:45Shankar Vedantam?

  You mentioned the work of the chemist Jen Heemstra a little while ago. She and her team really did their homework when searching for a way forward to isolate nucleic acids. Can you explain what they were trying to do and what they did?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Well, they were trying to get RNA, the double-stranded helix of RNA, to separate. And they tried various different reagents, which didn't work. And each of these experiments that fail is a disappointment. And yet, they doggedly continued. Then this young scientist named Steve Knudsen in her lab went to the literature and found a rather obscure paper from the 1960s. And it was talking about a reagent called glyoxol. And because of the properties of glyoxol, Steve hypothesized that it might work in their goal to separate the strands of RNA. And lo and behold, it worked.

• 48:45Shankar Vedantam?

  So really, I think the picture I'm getting from you, Amy, is that intelligent failures are not about gamblers or adventurers. In fact, they're taking chances while trying to de-risk things as much as possible.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yes, they want to succeed. But because they have chosen to try to succeed in new territory, can whether that's scientific research or a blind date, they're willing to do the work.

• 49:14Shankar Vedantam?

  You mentioned something else a second ago as well, which I think is really germane here, which is that you need a really strong stomach to tolerate repeated failures, because if you don't have that capacity, it's very difficult to practice intelligent failures.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yes, and you could think of that as a part of wisdom and a part of building characters, that ability to withstand the setbacks that are just ordinary parts of our jobs, they're parts of our lives. And it's essential to appreciate how necessary they are, especially if you are trying to pursue great things, if you're trying to make a contribution, if you're trying to live a full life. You have to learn to reframe the setbacks as necessary, as part of being human, and not as bad, I don't like it, to, oh, that's disappointing, but it's OK.

• 50:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, I've discovered 5,999 ways that you cannot build a light bulb, that these are all discoveries, not failures.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if Edison was sincere, and I'm going to believe that he was, he truly had learned how to think of each and every one of those failures as valuable information, as true discoveries in their own right. So that kind of cheerful attitude can seem Pollyanna-ish, but I disagree. I think it's actually scientifically valid.

• 50:46Shankar Vedantam?

  And perhaps a larger lesson is that many companies and many individuals should be seeking out intelligent failures more often.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  I think especially, you know, once you're an adult and once you have maybe some success or some area of expertise, it is so tempting to want to avoid failures at all costs, to not want to get anything wrong. So that would lead you to basically close yourself off from adventure, to not pick up a new sport, or make new friends, or pick up a hobby, or shift careers in some way that might be meaningful but scary to you. So, but then if you have a framework that says, well, it may not go well right away, but it will be an intelligent failure, because of course I'm not supposed to be expert at that yet, and the goal will be to learn.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  So it helps you think, I think, a more productive and thoughtful way about new experiences, so that you can welcome them rather than be reluctant to jump into them.

• 52:00Shankar Vedantam?

  As we go through life, there is one important ingredient in intelligent failures that we have not discussed. This ingredient shapes how we approach personal relationships, new ventures, and our careers. It shapes almost everything we do.

• 52:19Shankar Vedantam?

  That secret ingredient is money, or rather, the way we think about money. Money is a tool that allows us to pay the bills, to start a new business, to travel. How we grapple with money and think about debt can determine whether we successfully engage in intelligent ventures, including intelligent failures, or dive into things in a foolhardy manner, or are so risk averse that we never try anything new.

• 52:47Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, stories and advice on how to get money and debt to work for you. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 53:08Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next. Because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud: new customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged,

• 53:51Shankar Vedantam?

  or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar.

• 54:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from US Bank. With a US Bank Smartly Visa Signature Card, you earn an unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. No quarterly activations, no categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com/smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply.

• 54:44Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 54:48Shankar Vedantam?

  A central idea in treating failure as a friend instead of a foe is to understand the risks involved in different ventures.

• 54:59Shankar Vedantam?

  If the risks of failure are small, then it makes a lot of sense to try something new. If the risks are catastrophic, it's wise to be cautious.

• 55:10Shankar Vedantam?

  At Wright State University, John Dinsmore studies how we think about money and debt. Those things shape our ability to take on risk and to explore new ventures. We featured John's research on a recent episode of the show titled "The Debt Trap." Many listeners have thoughts, comments, and personal stories about their adventures with money and debt. John is back today to respond to those stories. John Dinsmore, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 55:39Shankar Vedantam?

  John, one of the things that makes it difficult to accurately judge the risk of doing or not doing something is what scientists call the optimism bias. When it comes to money and debt, how does this bias work?

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Well, we always tend, when we think of the future, we always tend to think of it in terms of things working out for us, us getting the promotion, us making more money in the future than we're making now. And while that is a good perspective to have in terms of perseverance and motivation, things don't always work out that way, right? We all have hiccups along the way. Everyone has a story of running into some bad luck. And when we make financial decisions involving projecting our future circumstances, that optimism can sometimes get us to take out more debt than we probably should, or maybe have things, our finances be a little tighter than they should going forward.

• 56:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Do we know why the optimism bias comes about, John? In some ways, you know, there's been other research that shows that human beings are very attentive to the negative. Why is it, in this case, when we think about the future, we tend to err on the side of the positive?

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Well, if you want to take what we call like an evolutionary perspective, beyond even just finances, you know, if we didn't believe that our future was going to be better than our present or our past, it'd be pretty hard to get out of bed in the morning. But it is this optimism, whether it's finances, or love, or anything else, it is something that convinces us to get up, get out of the house in the morning, and go live a life and maybe take some chances.

• 57:26Shankar Vedantam?

  We also discussed the idea of intertemporal discounting. How we value something today might not be how we value it in the future. How does this play out when it comes to taking on debt?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  When we're looking at taking on debt, and it could be something as simple as, you know, maybe buying some furniture. It doesn't have to be a house or a car or something like that. Studies have shown that we think of debt or expense differently in the future than when we're dealing with it today. So even though all of our past and our present tells us that, well, we're not going to have that much disposable income left at the end of the month, even if we push the payments for things off a little bit into the future, we somehow convince ourselves, well, I've never had disposable income in the last 30 years of life, but next year is probably going to be different, so I'll go ahead and take that chance.

• 58:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So, John, our troubles with debt are not exclusively the result of our own internal biases. Sometimes marketers and other operators are actively trying to manipulate our judgment. You've written about the concepts of drip pricing and drip debt. What are these, and how can they ensnare us?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Drip pricing is where you encounter a price for a good, and you think that it's all, that one price represents all that the good is going to cost you. But as you go through the purchasing price, there are all these little add-on costs. A popular example of drip pricing would be airline tickets, right? You get the airfare, you go through the work to figure out, here's the route, and the time, and the price. And then, once you select that flight and start going through the purchasing price, well, then you get hit with, do you want to choose your seat? Do you want to have priority boarding? Do you, all of these add-on things. But since people have already committed to the initial purchase, they usually absorb these extra prices as they go.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Typically, when you're looking at how certain forms of debt, say, credit cards are advertised, you usually just see one interest rate upfront, the interest rate being the price for the debt. But there are usually lots of kickers, whether it's late fees, or maybe the rate goes up over time. But, you know, we bite into that initial price that we encounter, and as we go through the purchasing process and we see all these escalators and added fees, we just kind of take them on, since we've already committed to the purchase.

• 59:57Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to share with you a story we heard from a listener named Maria because it seems to be a great example of how our logical minds can sometimes be hijacked by our emotions when it comes to money. So Maria was on vacation and on this vacation, she was convinced by marketers to purchase a timeshare. She says that she was enticed into the deal, which involved putting $10,000 down on a credit card after the salesman offered her three free weeks at any of the timeshare properties in their portfolio.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  We're normally very smart about our finances, but we got caught up on being vacationed and by the lure of the three weeks and then by the opportunity of staying in international locations. And well, it ended up being all lies, everything they said. They just made it impossible. And for all this time, you had to keep paying the monthly fee. In addition to the credit card that we purchased, the $10,000 was paid on a credit card. We also had to pay a monthly maintenance fee. We never even got to use it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  So basically, we lost $10,000 just from really stupidity.

• 1:01:16Shankar Vedantam?

  So John, the timeshare industry is especially well-known for hard selling. What do you hear in Maria's story?

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, Maria is not stupid. I mean, it sounds like, well, I'm sure there are lots of perfectly reputable timeshare companies out there. I mean, there is, as you alluded to, a reputation for certain operators within the space. It sounded like there was a misrepresentation of what was going to be offered. I think also, you know, salespeople have the choice, as do marketers, of presenting the facts or the attributes of the product that helped them make the sale. It doesn't sound like that they were upfront about all the fees that would be coming on

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  and probably presented it as if you pay this $10,000, you're going to get all of these things. And then, of course, when they make the purchase, they probably get a 100-page contract that includes all the fees that no one wants to read. And she probably just wanted to get on to her international vacation. So she's not stupid. Nobody reads those contracts. But hopefully, in the future, she will pay someone to read a contract like that because there can be a lot of very expensive things hidden in those pages.

• 1:02:38Shankar Vedantam?

  So talk about two ideas that you just raised. One is that just the sheer complexity of many of these agreements make it very difficult for people to make good judgments about what it is that they're actually signing on to.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Right. So as a marketer, and even though I wrote a book that's skewering a lot of marketing practices, I would say that when you're advertising something, the mantra is to go for simplicity. If there's something you really want people to remember and understand, you make your argument as simple as possible. Well, if you're going to take the other side of that, if there's something you don't want people to understand or pay attention to, you make it very complex. And I would imagine that, you know, with Maria, a lot of those gotcha aspects were hidden in the complexities of fine print.

• 1:03:30Shankar Vedantam?

  The other issue that strikes me about Maria's story, John, and I wonder if this has ever happened to you, is that, you know, when a salesperson is sitting in front of you and they're showing you brochures of these beautiful vacation properties in fabulous locations, it's very difficult not to imagine yourself sitting in one of these beautiful properties, you know, enjoying the sun on your face, enjoying the sand under your toes. And at that point, it becomes more difficult in some ways to think critically about the contract that they're actually placing before you.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  No, I think that's fair. I think there's a fair, some amount of seduction in getting people to think about living the life that they aspire to, even if it's not a life that they can afford and showing, say, you work hard. And of course, that person does work hard. Don't you deserve to be skiing on the slopes of Aspen? I mean, deserve, sure, but you still can't afford it. So it's easy to get swept away when things like that are presented to you.

• 1:04:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Has that ever happened to you, John? Have you ever had a time when your emotions have basically swept you off your feet and prevented you from thinking clearly about a decision?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I'm a drummer. And right after college, before trying to get on with quote unquote, adult life, I was actually a touring musician, playing with a jam band, playing drums. And I ended up being talked into buying drums that were way out of my price range by a very skilled salesperson. And I think a lot of it was, you know, it was so tied to my aspirations of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to be looked at, that yes, the salesperson was very skilled, but I think I was also very kind of ripe for the picking, given where I was at the time.

• 1:05:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk a moment about what the salesperson did? How did that interaction go that made you ripe for the picking?

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Well, the salesperson took a big interest in me, asking me all sorts of questions, and then went about having me imagine, you know, they always say, there's an old adage in advertising saying, you know, don't sell the journey, sell the destination. And him painting a picture of me kind of as an accomplished musician with, you know, adoring fans and having, you know, climbed the mountain of trying to be a professional musician. And I just, I was seduced.

• 1:06:03Shankar Vedantam?

  So John, I understand that your son is now a musician, and I'm guessing you've probably bought musical instruments for him. Have you used your own experience from back in the day to inform how you help your son make better decisions, both musical and financial?

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So, you know, we started with, he said he wanted to play bass. So there was a starter bass kit at Walmart for 100 bucks. So we started there. And I said, show me that, you know, you're going to stick with it, that you're going to practice. And so then we went to slightly better bass. And when he got his first job, and so musicians always want to get, I think, new gear. I have advised him, look, used gear is typically as good as new. And so I've really tried to help him focus on value rather than, you know, brand or flash or image or that sort of thing, of really getting the most of your money.

• 1:07:04Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the stories we tell and the stories we inherit about money and how they shape our financial decision making. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. Hiring Pro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com/HB.

• 1:07:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:07:53Speaker 05

  At California Closets, we design for the little things. Take this moment of a woman getting dressed for an early meeting while her husband's still asleep. Sorry. And now, the California Closets version of that moment, featuring custom softclothes drawers. Bedroom and home storage solutions by designers who get you. California Closets, more room for what matters.

• 1:08:29Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:08:34Shankar Vedantam?

  The Beatles said that money can't buy you love. Whatever the truth of that statement, this much is certain. There are a great many things in life for which you do need money.

• 1:08:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Learning to use money well and to also understand the way your own mind thinks about money is a crucial part of becoming an effective adult.

• 1:08:56Shankar Vedantam?

  John Dinsmore is the author of The Marketing of Debt: How They Get You. John, we were just talking about the experience of a listener named Maria who lost thousands of dollars after she was pressured into buying a timeshare. One thing I noticed in Maria's story is that she feels really badly about the mistake. She thinks of herself as being smart with finances, but she now feels stupid in buying the timeshare. Talk a moment about how debt can affect our self-confidence, even our self-concept.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I will say, after our original episode aired, I received email from people who said that they enjoyed listening to the episode because they had had similar experiences and they'd been carrying lots of shame around. The truth is, even the most successful people have some financial decisions they'd like back if they could. I owned a house in Washington, DC, and I think I sold it about five minutes before the real estate boom happened in the mid 2000s. And, you know, where I had made a tidy, like, modest profit. If I had held on to it for a year or two, I would have just made an insane amount of money.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  And it took me several years to actually kind of get comfortable with it, even though we all just do the best we can with the information we have at the time, and none of us bat a thousand. You know, the most successful, you can think of, you know, name your billionaire. I mean, they still have a number of, they've made a number of wrong calls in their time, even if on balance, they've done really, really well. So the challenge is to keep moving forward and understand that, you know, we're all going to miss a few along the way.

• 1:10:40Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, John, if the reverse is also true, that sometimes, you know, we make correct financial decisions, but we are correct largely because of luck, and now we start to overestimate our own financial skill and acumen.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's pretty fair. Human beings in general are pretty uncomfortable with the subject of luck. We tend to think of, psychologists allude to something called attribution theory. So for what I do as a teacher, the joke is if a student gets an A, they will say that they earned an A. But if, if they get an F, they'll say that the professor gave them an F, right? And so there's some loaded language in there that reflects some sense of self-concept, right? And we do this with financial decision-making, too. So we may punish ourselves too much for something that didn't work out great, or we may think that we're geniuses. When actually, you know what? It just so happened that, you know, maybe I had to sell the house

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  because I had a new job and I had to move to a new town, and it just so happened that that coincided with a really great time to sell the house.

• 1:11:49Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, I think what you forget in retrospect is all of that other detail. You know, all of the things that were weighing on you that prompted you to say, I want to sell the house right now. Looking back, all you think about is, oh, my gosh, if I had waited two years, I could have made a windfall. And you tend to forget all of the details that prompted you to make the decision that you actually made.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Right. And also, you know, thinking of the house I sold in retrospect too early. Well, I was renting it out. The tenants were driving me crazy. I was glad to be rid of it. And then, you know, a year or two later, all of a sudden, I thought, what an idiot I was, where at the time, I made what was the right decision for me.

• 1:12:31Shankar Vedantam?

  We heard from a listener named Hannah, who called in with a story about buying her first home at the age of 29. Hannah says the whole process was really easy, and she was especially drawn to what seemed like a too-good-to-be-true monthly maintenance fee on the townhouse.

• 1:12:46Speaker 06

  I remember thinking, how did I get so lucky that this was simple? I found a good deal on a place that I really loved, and my offer was accepted right away. The inspection came back clean, and it felt like everything was just falling into place. I also thought I scored big because finding a townhome with no HOA fees was rare, and this didn't have any HOA. I was saving at least 250 a month, probably more, just from no HOA. But fast forward to 2023, and I had moved out. I was renting the place to tenants, and they mentioned that they saw a small hole in the corner of one of the upstairs bedrooms. But I'd lived there for three years, and I never noticed anything like that.

• 1:13:30Speaker 06

  I thought it was minor. But when we had someone come out and look, what we discovered was that the entire backside of the house had extensive dry rot caused by long-term water damage. It was affecting three different owners before me and went unnoticed, but then it became my problem. It wasn't a sudden event or weather catastrophe, so insurance wouldn't cover it. To repair the structural damage, studs, insulation, siding and all, it cost me over $90,000. So what I thought was a really simple, lucky, first-time-home-buying experience, it was pretty much the most expensive lesson I ever learned, and I'm still recovering from the financial impact.

• 1:14:12Shankar Vedantam?

  So, John, I find Hannah's story very relatable. Homeownership can sometimes feel like an endless money pit of repairs and fixes. What do you make of Hannah's story?

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Well, one, I'm really sorry for Hannah, because that is an incredible amount of money. But I, I don't think she necessarily made any mistake. You know, you can't predict every possible outcome. Like, I know there, there's people who ran into COVID, right? And ended up getting, having trouble paying for houses that they bought and that sort of thing. Well, I mean, who could have seen that coming? That was, you know, the first pandemic in 100 years. So, I mean, sometimes, again, we just get unlucky.

• 1:14:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So, John, you talk about something called the expense prediction bias, and I'm wondering whether Hannah's story might be a candidate for this bias.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  So, expense prediction bias says that we actually are pretty good at being able to predict our regular expenses, right? So things like our mortgage or heating bill, they happen at the same time every month and typically for about the same amounts. But we are pretty poor at predicting our irregular expenses. So things like car repairs, home repairs, entertainment expenses, things like that that happen sporadically and at different amounts. So we, when we think of a budget or we're trying to predict how much things are going to cost us over a given month, we're able to incorporate the regular expenses, but we completely ignore the irregular expenses.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  If you have ever owned a home, you know that there's always going to be frequent but irregularly timed, maybe not every month, but, you know, one happens three months, and then another seven months from then. These significant expenses that you know are going to happen at some point, but you don't know exactly when or for what amount. So we tend to not take those into account in terms of our mental budgets and how much we think something's going to cost.

• 1:16:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So in Hannah's case, I mean, the expense was, you know, just gigantic, $90,000. But for many other people, it could be, you know, your heating unit breaks down, or your AC needs work, or some other big expense that you hadn't quite budgeted for.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, if you look back at, like, the housing collapse in the early 2000s, there were a lot of people who were not taking all of the expenses of homeownership into account. And a significant, significant number of people who, you know, if their refrigerator went out or they had to have something done to the roof, all of a sudden were, you know, way over budget on things. And these are, again, irregular expenses. So it's, it's pretty common that people fail to take these into account when making a budget.

• 1:17:09Shankar Vedantam?

  We received an email from a listener named Bill. He writes, "My father grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. His guide to borrowing was, if you can't afford to pay cash, you can't afford it." What do you think of this approach by Bill's father, John?

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Well, Bill's father is not unusual in that respect. There's a number of people and people who have significant followings online, who say you should never take out any debt for any reason. And the truth is, sometimes you have to take out debt. There's a lot of jobs that, well, if I'm going to have this job, then I need a car. And unless I can stroke a check for however much money, then I need a car loan. Well, I definitely want to have a job, so I'm going to take out a loan for it. The truth is, debt is an essential component of modern life, but it does need to be managed properly. So that's great if you can pay cash for everything. I see the wisdom in it, but most people can't.

• 1:18:08Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of things like education, housing, and transportation that you're probably going to need to take on some debt. Just don't take on more of it than you have to, or a more expensive version of it than you should.

• 1:18:24Shankar Vedantam?

  So we often acquire our financial beliefs by watching how family members deal with money. Talk a moment about how the social context around us can affect our own cognitive biases when it comes to our finances and when it comes to debt.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  So context matters quite a bit, whether it's culture or your community and where you're surrounded, right? So people typically have very limited financial means. Typically, there are fewer resources for financial education. There's typically fewer people in a household who are savvy about handling debt and understanding things like compound interest versus other communities or cultures that are maybe more affluent, where there are people who have greater experience in handling this. And because studies show that financial education is not a one and done type of thing,

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  the effects of financial education fade over time. Being in these communities or cultures where there's more familiarity and experience in dealing with it, they tend to do better over the long term in managing debt appropriately.

• 1:19:41Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering whether, when you look around the world, though, whether there are differences between places, John. I can imagine that places that have been through war or civil war or natural disasters might think about setbacks and debt very differently than places that are used to good things happening or have had good things happen to them over a long period of time.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  I would imagine so. I think what you see across cultures is that people who've had bad experiences with finances or with other things like war, they typically carry these experiences with them, and it changes their behavior over the long term. So a prior listener was talking about a grandfather who made it through the Great Depression. That entire generation was never the same with money after dealing with financial trauma like that. So it does change cultures over time, having gone through periods of extreme scarcity.

• 1:20:44Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the forces outside our control that can shape our financial futures. Plus, advice for keeping your head above water when it feels like you're drowning in debt. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

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• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NUR-TAC or visit nurtc.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 1:22:12Speaker 07

  Welcome to Science of Perception Box. Perception Box. Perception Box. One's own perception of consciousness. The Perception Box.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. Yet we often don't even recognize it's there.

• 1:22:32Speaker 07

  Your face is a mask, and you're behind this mask. Science of Perception Box. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:22:45Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Wright State University, John Dinsmore looks at the psychology of money and debt. He's the author of The Marketing of Debt: How They Get You. John, one thing we haven't talked about yet are the many structural factors at play that shape our finances. In the United States, for example, there's a lot of concern about the price of homes or the cost of healthcare or stagnant wages for workers. Even without the mental biases that can trip us up as individuals, these factors can make it really difficult for people to get ahead. How do you make sense of the interplay between these structural forces and how our individual minds make decisions around money?

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there are some things, policies, I think, that could be invoked to make debt more user-friendly and better understood. And that, I think, would be a good thing for consumers as a whole. Now, in terms of, you know, why do we struggle with figuring out debt? It's because it's hard, right? It's a highly complicated thing. You know, most things that we buy have a price associated with them that is static. It doesn't change. But the price for a lot of debt changes every day. And maybe there's multiple prices. And how we perceive those prices depends on a lot of things. Our background and skill, the context of that day.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  Were we feeling good that day? Were we feeling tired? Were we in a noisy environment where it was hard to think? So all of those things can come to play to contribute to the quality of a financial decision or the lack thereof.

• 1:24:27Shankar Vedantam?

  A listener named Anna called in with a moving story. In 2017, she and her new husband bought their first home. The house needed a ton of work, and they met this challenge. They fixed it up, and then they sold it at a nice profit. Using this cash in hand, they decided to build their dream house. I'll let Anna pick up the story from here.

• 1:24:48Speaker 05

  My dream was to build our forever home somewhere that felt rural enough for my kids to play in the woods and climb trees, just like I did, but still close enough to everything in the city. We went with a turnkey build, so we paid the builder for the land up front, and the builder handled construction. And then we would close once the home was finished, just like a traditional purchase. So we bought almost three acres for under $80,000, designed a modest colonial with a front porch on a plot of land that bordered a babbling brook, and we put everything in storage. And that's when everything started to fall apart.

• 1:25:24Shankar Vedantam?

  So in 2021, John, Anna and her family moved into a small apartment as they waited for the construction of their dream house. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, building a new house became very, very expensive. Material costs and mortgage rates skyrocketed. And here is Anna with the rest of the story.

• 1:25:43Speaker 05

  By the time our house was finally ready, our rate had gone from what would have been around 4.9% to 8%, which meant the mortgage we had planned for and knew we could afford had doubled. We had thousands of dollars invested, nowhere else to go, and rent was not any cheaper. So we closed and trusted it would work out, but it became unsustainable pretty quickly. We were putting everyday expenses on credit cards just to keep up. More than half my paycheck went to childcare, and most of my husband's paycheck went to the mortgage. And the hardest part in all of this was, we did everything, quote unquote, "right." We bought the fixer-upper, we built the sweat equity, we followed the plan.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  But the goalposts just kept moving. And I think that's the part that people don't always understand. Sometimes you can follow every step you are given, only to find out that the system was never built for you to win.

• 1:26:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So John, I really feel for Anna. It's heartbreaking when she says she feels the system wasn't built for her to win. She's still struggling with that as a result of what happened. How would you advise her to think about it?

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  I would probably say to Anna, a couple of things. One, it sounds like she and her husband took a very thoughtful approach to things. And we're doing things the right way, or at least in a careful and thoughtful way. And then she ran into a once in a century event like COVID-19. It's probably cold comfort, but if you're familiar with the Sphere in Las Vegas, so James Dolan, who owns the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden, he planned to build the Sphere at the exact same time that Anna was building her house and ran into the same challenges. And it doubled the cost of that venue.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  Now, James Dolan is a super rich guy, and so he can afford to have probably more financial pitfalls than the rest of us. But it's just a way of demonstrating that, you know, they didn't do anything wrong. Right? In terms of, you know, it feels like the system isn't built for them. You know, the one part where I would agree is that financial theory requires that if someone is a riskier borrower, they have to be charged higher interest rates. Well, who's considered a risky borrower? Well, probably someone with less money. So this means that someone with less money is typically paying more for their loans than someone with lots of money.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  And there's, you know, plenty of arguments that economists and finance people can make as to why that is and that there is good that it does bring. But it does feel sometimes that the people who need a break the most aren't getting that break. It sounds like they've navigated the situation as well as you can and that they're digging out. Crawling out of a debt hole is one of the hardest things you can do because you found yourself in that hole because you didn't have enough money in the first place. And now you have to find not only enough money to live, but even more money that you didn't have before to start paying down this debt. And that can be a vicious cycle.

• 1:29:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. Can you talk a moment about a subtext in Anna's story, which is she feels like this is really unfair? And you can hear this in what she says. She says, you know, we did everything right and it still didn't work out. Talk about this idea that our sense of fairness is actually an integral part of how we think about money. We have sort of internal norms and rules about how we think money should operate, how debt should operate. And it really pains us when those rules are broken.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  Yes. And if you, there's a big, if you study pricing, which is one of the areas that I do, price fairness is a big determinant of how people feel about the price of something. Right? A favorite example is Coca-Cola experimented with doing dynamic pricing with some of their machines. And the hotter it was outside, the more they charged for beverages out of the machine. And people were furious about it because they felt like that they were being exploited. They felt it was unfair. Now, there is a lot about dealing with debt and purveyors of debt that can feel either unfair and/or maybe disingenuous because it's very complex.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  A lot of things are buried in the fine print. So it can feel like maybe there, it is unfair and that maybe even people are out to get us. There are good purveyors of these services and products out there. And you can find them. But on the other hand, too, sometimes, again, we're just unlucky. And it sounds like Anna, unfortunately, was, she just ran into a very unlucky thing, even though she and her husband were doing things the right way.

• 1:30:44Shankar Vedantam?

  The foreword to your book, John, is by an advertising executive who writes, "In the end, the best marketing isn't about separating people from their money. It's about connecting people with solutions, products, and services that they want and need." Now, I love that. It makes me think that some portion of the solution to our problems with debt have to do with encouraging more ethical practices in business and in marketing?

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So I've, I've been in marketing. I was in marketing industry and now marketing academia my whole life, although I wrote a book that's kind of making fun of marketers and some of the tactics that you'll see. But the truth is, there can be a lot of good that's done in business or in marketing if you really just focus on creating something that people want and find of value. There is a negative connotation to marketing where that it's, you know, either superfluous or disingenuous. But there are companies that are really great at marketing and create products and services that we really love. And that is, I think, the ultimate goal of, of marketing and business, whether it's

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  in financial services or elsewhere, which is if you are really thinking about your customer and something that they would benefit from, that would make their lives better, that the business can win and the customer can win.

• 1:32:13Shankar Vedantam?

  John Dinsmore studies marketing at Wright State University. He's the author of The Marketing of Debt: How They Get You. John, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Thank you, Shankar.

• 1:32:28Shankar Vedantam?

  We also heard today from Harvard's Ilmi Edmondson, who's the author of the book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing.

• 1:32:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:33:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, we say a heartfelt thank you to Hidden Brain producer Autumn Barnes, who's been with Hidden Brain since the launch of our independent media company in 2020. Autumn is leaving to pursue graduate work in mental health counseling, which is a fitting career move for someone with Autumn's kindness and emotional intelligence. Autumn, we are so grateful for your hard work on both Hidden Brain and Myon Sanghera, and we're rooting for you as you begin this new adventure. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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• 1:34:18Speaker 05

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• 1:35:03Speaker 05

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTEC or visit Nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

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