The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure

Key Insights Across the Series

Expertise as Double-Edged Sword: Deep domain knowledge builds confidence that can lead to overconfidence, filtering out risks and distorting perceptions of vulnerability.
Invisible Organizational Failures: Major disasters like Titanic and Challenger stem from universal psychological and organizational mechanisms, not incompetence, where pressure suppresses contrary evidence.
Psychology of Risk Translation: Failures arise from disconnects between physical reality, engineering knowledge, psychological beliefs, and organizational incentives.
Need for External Safeguards: Individual awareness of dangers is insufficient; organizations must implement checklists, review boards, and dissent structures to ensure contrary evidence is addressed.

The Structural Post-Mortem Series - Case studies of catastrophic failures
Human Systems and Behavior - Cognitive biases and decision-making patterns
The Drivers Mind Series - Psychology of human-machine interaction in transportation

References

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The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust

The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The System Was Meant to Help. It Lied About What It Was Doing. Between October 2018 and March 2019, two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashed within five months of each other. Lion Air Flight 610 crashed near Jakarta on October 29, 2018, killing 189 people. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed near Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing 157 people. The technical cause was identical in both cases: a system called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) repeatedly pushed the nose of the aircraft downward, and the pilots couldn’t stop it. ...

The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy

The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop

The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The Test That Nobody Could Stop On April 26, 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded, releasing 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The immediate death toll was 31. The long-term casualties—cancer, thyroid disease, genetic damage—have never been fully counted, though estimates exceed 4,000 deaths. The exclusion zone encompasses 2,600 square kilometers of permanently contaminated land. ...

The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence

The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The Data Was in the Room. It Just Didn’t Speak. On the morning of January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with 7 crew members aboard. 73 seconds later, the vehicle disintegrated in the sky, killing everyone on board. The technical cause was well understood within minutes: an O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster had failed in the cold temperatures, allowing hot gases to escape and erode the external tank. ...

The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat

The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The Blueprint Was Flawless. The Failure Was Psychological. On April 10, 1912, the RMS Titanic departed Southampton carrying 2,224 passengers and crew. Within five days, the ship would sink in the North Atlantic, killing 1,503 people. The tragedy wasn’t caused by incompetent design. Quite the opposite. The Titanic was built by Harland and Wolff, the world’s premier shipbuilder, at a cost equivalent to $200 million today. Its watertight compartments, double bottom, and advanced steam engines represented the cutting edge of 1912 engineering. The ship’s designers were the best available. The technology was state-of-the-art. Yet these advantages became fatal liabilities because they triggered a psychological mechanism so powerful it rendered obvious risks invisible: the expert blind spot combined with systematic normalization of deviance. ...

References Adensamer, A., Gsenger, R., & Klausner, L. (2021). “Computer says no”: Algorithmic decision support and organisational responsibility. Journal of Responsible Technology, 7, 100014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2021.100014 Bauer, W., Hämmerle, M., Schlund, S., & Vocke, C. (2019). Designing AI-supported human-machine interaction. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 131, 25-39. Bernabei, M., & Costantino, F. (2024). The role of automation in operator performance degradation: A systematic review. Safety Science, 170, 106329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106329 Bloch, K. (2016). Incident investigation. In Rethinking Bhopal (pp. 45-67). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-803778-2.00003-5 ...

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