All Too Human: Understanding and Improving our Relationships with Technology

Description

Why do people fear air travel, but text while driving? How were the travesties at the Abu Ghraib prison like a nuclear meltdown? What is the best way to throw a rocket at a robot? These are just a few questions addressed by the field of human factors psychology. These scientists use knowledge of how people think and why they act to improve the design of our world. In All Too Human, Dr. Anne McLaughlin introduces the field with vivid and topical stories that hinge on cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making. From the COVID-19 pandemic, to abandoned SCUBA divers, conspiracy theories, and the travails of online dating, McLaughlin draws on a century of research into the human mind to explain our past and predict our future.

Anne McLaughlin is Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University, USA. She has worked as an educator and researcher in the field of human factors psychology and directs cutting-edge research on human behavior and cognition with research projects funded by NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

'A fantastic and approachable journey to understand the capability and limitations of the human brain and what we can do about it to improve technology and our world in general. McLaughlin offers the reader relatable true stories, helping us understand why catastrophes like Chernobyl or a miraculous emergency plane landing on the Hudson can happen. The common denominator is human limitations and errors. We can either pretend we are error-proof or accept that humans are fallible. The latter allows us to adequately design and engineer solutions to prevent errors from being fatal and build a safer and more equitable society. This book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand why we can forget very important things, or struggle to use a piece of technology.' Celia Hodent, Ph.D. in psychology, UX strategist, author of The Gamer's Brain, The Psychology of Video Games, and What UX is Really About 'In an era of hot takes and tweet length quippy comebacks, Dr. McLaughlin has given us a nuanced, thoughtful, and always entertaining re-analysis of failures both small in scale (e.g. a scuba diver left behind by their dive boat) and large (e.g. the Abu Ghraib human rights violations). Leveraging her considerable expertise in cognitive psychology and system design, Dr. McLaughlin explains how our brains make sense of the world, as well as explains the highly knowable conditions under which this sense-making fails. And therein lies McLaughlin's central thesis - these failures and tragedies are often caused not by the malicious or the stupid, but rather by systems that do not account for the nuances of human sense-making.' Tim Nichols, Head of Hardware UX Research, Human Factors & Pathfinding Meta Reality Labs, Meta, USA 'Psychologist Anne McLaughlin's new book, All Too Human, is a wonderful read - a fascinating tour of the capacity and limits of our minds and bodies. With vivid and compelling examples, McLaughlin shows how rigorous human factors research and design can help us more safely navigate a complex world - whether we're using a dating site, landing a jet airliner on the Hudson River, or surviving a pandemic.' Cat Warren, author of the NY Times bestseller What the Dog Knows