There is a tendency to regard man-made disasters as being due to some rare species of monumental blunder. Here it is argued that only the less forgiving circumstances of their occurrence distinguish these catastrophic errors from the familiar slips and lapses of every day life. It therefore pays us to make a close study of these normally banal mistakes. Not only do they inform us about the systematic biases that contribute to human error, they also provide valuable clues to the normally hidden mechanisms tbat govern our thought, words and deeds.
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