"The Design Of Everyday Things" Ch. 2

    I very much enjoyed the second chapter of The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman, which considered "The Psychology of Everyday Actions." The part that struck me most out of this chapter, however, was when Norman noted that "people tend to assign a causal relation whenever two things occur in succession" (p. 40). I think that I noticed this the most because I have experienced so many ridiculous, and occasionally hilarious, incorrect assumptions of causality. It also reminds me of the saying "correlation does not mean causality." If we took correlation to mean causality, then we could prove that global warming is caused by pirates.

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     I know what you're thinking right now: Obviously! How did we never notice that pirates and global temperature are irrefutably linked?! Yeah, um, so that "fact" is actually refutable. Not every data sets ever compared are influencing each other, as is likely the case with pirates and global warming. To prove causality, we must do further research in order to determine how they interact. If you can prove to me that pirates are actually alien air-conditioners and thus their existence postponed the onset of global warming, then I will believe that the lack of pirates is causing global warming. Until then, I remain very, very skeptical.
   Now, back to "people tend to assign a causal relation whenever two things occur in succession" (p. 40). Here is an example: A person is using their laptop. They open an email from someone that they don't know. The screen goes black. The person automatically assumes that there was a virus in the email and that it crashed their computer. This would be true, if there was always a causal link whenever two things occur in succession. What actually happened was that the fans in the laptop had stopped working a while earlier and the heat from the computer had burnt a hole in the hard drive. Norman claims, and I agree, that this incorrect assumption is reasonable given the information that the computer-user had. Thus, the incorrect assumption was actually the fault of the designer who did not think to have some system to alert the user that the fans were broken.