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. ...