Willful Blindness Quotes

“You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“As long as it (an issue) remains invisible, it is guaranteed to remain insoluble.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“We know - intellectually - that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Silence is the language of inertia.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“money appears to motivate only our interest in ourselves, making us selfish and self-centered...Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don't need or care about others; it's each man for himself”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness the better. The next time you hear boasts of executives pulling an all-nighter or holding conference calls in their cars, be sure to offer your condolences; it's grim being stuck in sweatshops run by managers too ignorant to understand productivity and risk. Working people like this is as smart as running your factory without maintenance. In manufacturing and engineering businesses, everyone learns that the top priority is asset integrity: protecting the machinery on which the business depends. In knowledge-based economies, that machinery is the mind.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Humans do not have enough mental capacity to do all the things that we think we can do. As attentional load increases, attentional capacity gradually diminishes.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Overall, people are about twice as likely to seek information that supports their own point of view as they are to consider an opposing idea.19”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Dominant people, it appears, use snap judgements and conform to received wisdom more than do the less dominant. Those who need power, and those who have it, think differently.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert...Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“In treating people as less important than things, work becomes both demoralised and demoralising and we become blind to the moral content of our decisions...Money and wilfful blindness make us act in ways incompatible wiht what believe our ethics to be, and often even with our own self-interest...the problem with money isn't fundamentally about greed, although it can be comforting to think so. The problem with money is that we live in societies in which mutual support and co-operation is essential, but money erodes the relationships we need to lead productive, fulfilling and genuinely happy lives. When money becomes the dominant behavior, it doesn't cooperate with, or amplify, our relationships; it disengages us from them.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Was I wilfully blind when I married Michael? Of course I was. I knew about his heart condition - everyone did. But I fell in love with him and decided it didn't matter. We were going to live for ever, somehow. Now I know that the fact that we had the same initials, were both expatriates, had gone to the same university, and were of medium build made the relationship highly determined. But I might have done the research and discovered his short life expectancy or talked to psychologists about the pain of grieving or read books about the sadness of widowhood. But I didn't do any of those things. I looked away from those sad certainties and pretended that they weren't there.
Love is blind, not, as in mythology, because Cupid's arrows are random but because, once struck by them, we are left blind. When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion — but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The only consequence of their (employee) silence is that the blind (employer) lead the blind.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Knowing the hard limits to our cognitive capacity and the huge cost of working long hours should not be an intractable problem to address. We have a century of data and a roll call of the disastrous consequences that follow those who insist that heroic hours are a proof of commitment to an employer. Companies that measure work by hours could make themselves smarter by the simple act of measuring contribution by output and rewarding those who go home.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Moreover, sleep deprivation starts to starve the brain. There is a reason why we start to eat comfort food—doughnuts, candy—when we’re tired: our brains crave sugar. After twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of 6 percent in glucose reaching the brain.9 But the loss isn’t shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we need most for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.10 To Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is downright dangerous.11 He’s amazed by today’s work cultures that glorify sleeplessness, the way the age of Mad Men once glorified people who could hold their drink.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“The forty-hour week is there for a reason; it gets the best work from people. The first four hours of work are the most productive and, as the day wears on, everyone becomes less alert, less focused, and prone to more mistakes. In 1908, the first known study by Ernst Abbe,5 one of the founders of the Zeiss lens laboratory, concluded that reducing the working day from nine to eight hours actually increased output. Henry Ford, who studied productivity issues obsessively, reached the same conclusion and infuriated his manufacturing colleagues when, in 1926, he had the audacity to introduce a forty-hour work week. Subsequent studies by Foster Wheeler (1968), Procter & Gamble (1980), members of the construction industry, and many, many more show that, as the days get longer, productivity declines. No study has ever convincingly argued otherwise.6”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril