Psychotherapy for Economic Development Officials

Well…maybe that’s a little over the top. Okay: How about cognitive therapy—which helps people understand how their thoughts affect their decisions and actions? Cognitive therapy could help them spot and correct “cognitive traps,” a term Jerome Groopman, MD coined in his best seller, How Doctors Think. Groopman distinguishes between medical mistakes and misdiagnosis, which provide a “window into the medical mind.” When he looked through that window, Groopman saw that doctors sometimes diagnosis patients based on their appearances and the feelings they evoked.

Just as doctors diagnose and treat a patient’s ills, economic development officials diagnose and treat the economy’s ills. Consequently, these officials too may be vulnerable to cognitive traps. No one has identified the traps that potentially affect them, but we might get an idea about such traps from U.C. Berkeley national security affairs professor Zachary Shore, whose book, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions, identifies seven cognitive traps that have afflicted policy makers since ancient times. We describe each trap below and provide an example from Blunder. You can decide if each trap afflicts economic development decision making.    

Cognitive Trap	Description	Example
Exposure Anxiety	Fearing others will see you as weak and indecisive	In 427 B.C., Cleon warned the Athenians that showing mercy to the rebellious Mytilenians would be a sign of weakness and encourage more rebellion. But Diodotus warned that annihilating these people would only encourage others to strengthen their cities or fight to the bitter end, thus prolonging a conflict.
Causefusion	Misunderstanding the causes of complex events	The ancient Romans, believing that swamp odor cause intense fever, vomiting, and weakness (i.e., malaria or mala (bad) aria (air)), got rid of the odor by draining the swamps. The solution worked and the bad air theory persisted until someone discovered that water, not odor was the culprit.
Flatview	Defining issues in either-or terms	Robert McNamara believed that North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was just another communist leader pushing communism in the global battle between capitalists and communists. But McNamara ignored evidence that Ho was also a nationalist, seeking a unified and independent Vietnam.
Cure-allism	Believing one theory or solution explains or solves all problems	“If any single cure-all has run rampant in America, privation is it,” Shore wrote. Because governments can successfully privatize some functions or services doesn’t mean they can do so for all services. For example, a private company running a prison makes money by “seeing the prison population rise.” Arguably, “a society should want to see its prison population fall…”
Infomania	Hording or avoiding information	Because he feared his military, Saddam Hussein withheld vital information from his field commanders about the strength and location of different military units (i.e., “infomiser”). This proved fatal when the Gulf War broke out. In the 1820, Vietnamese Emperor Gia Long’s deep distrust of foreign emissaries kept him from meeting with them and learning things about them he could have used to prevent them from dominating his country. Siam’s (now Thailand) King Mongkut met with Western emissaries, studied their ways, and used that information to play them against each other
Mirror Imaging	Assuming that everyone (maybe every life form) thinks and acts like us	Animal science professor Temple Grandin did what many animal handlers fail to do—look at things from the animal’s perspective—and saw how they could save money and time by designing structures and processes consistent with animal behavior.
Static Cling	Refusing to recognize or accept changes	IBM saw its market share shrink in the 1990s to smaller more dynamic computer companies because it wouldn’t recognize that things had changed. “For upper management on down, IBM employees had been lulled into complacency, believing that IBM’s dominant position simply existed as part of the natural order of things.”