The Things you Miss

How the brain can prioritise the obvious - but wrong - information

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The story of the statistician Abraham Wald goes that when World War II bomber planes returned with bullet holes, these parts of the planes were reinforced. Abraham Wald, however, made the counter-intuitive argument of reinforcing the areas that hadn’t been damaged. The result was that losses decreased dramatically.

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This is the story reported in an issue of Nautil.us (one of my favourite reading materials). The article is focused on systems thinking, which is a favourite topic of mine, but I would like to focus on the cognitive concept of attention and how this applies to business. This is because there are “logical” and obvious things to focus on.

In the above story the bombers would return, and the obvious solution would be to armour or reinforce the areas of the plane that had bullet holes in. So far sounds logical – the planes are being hit – we can see where they’re being hit - so let’s reinforce those areas. This highlights a number of cognitive fallacies and of how the brain prioritises information – often the wrong information.