How people make decisions, size up situations, spot anomalies, and
anticipate problems in real-world settings.
Gary Klein, author of the bestselling Sources of Power, is the cognitive
psychologist who discovered how people actually make decisions,
particularly under time pressure and uncertainty. In Snapshots of the
Mind, he offers a set of short essays--"snapshots" of different aspects
of cognitive functioning in real-world settings that will help us learn
to recognize the cognitive processes that underlie and drive
performance. In these essays Klein provides practical tools for escaping
fixation on initial hunches and learning to detect the ways that people
make decisions, size up situations, spot anomalies, and anticipate
problems.
Snapshots of the Mind grows out of the Naturalistic Decision Making
movement, which studies how decision makers handle uncertainty and
complexity in high-stakes situations. In the essays, Klein examines how
people make tough choices and assessments in the real-world, discussing
such topics as training, information technology, teamwork, expertise,
and insights. Debunking the idea that artificial intelligence will soon
take over human decision making, he argues instead for machines that
make us smarter and expand our expertise. He describes his
Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model, which has been incorporated
into Army doctrine and was one of the inspirations for Malcolm
Gladwell's Blink. Snapshots of the Mind offers fresh takes on such
topics as confirmation bias, anomaly detection, intuition, anticipatory
thinking and perspective-taking. Readers come away attuned to the
primary aspects of expert cognition: the mindsets, mental models, and
perceptual sensitivity.
