Humans And Their Ability To Make Mistakes

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as being
a wrong physical move. If a person is walking in the woods and trips on a branch,
it is because the person erred in the sense of watching the path followed.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that humans make mistakes all the
time. Let us simply analyze any process in which there is a chance for someone
to commit an error. Take for example a cashier in a grocery store. The cashier
obtains the total on the cash register, and receives a twenty dollar bill from
the customer. She must now give the patron back his/her change. The cash
register tells the cashier that the client is owed 4.60$. The cashier then
reaches into her change drawer to retrieve the proper set of coins. This is
where the opportunity for error increases. What if the cashier only gives the
customer back $4.55, because she mistakenly returned a nickel instead of a dime?
What caused this blunder? Would this blunder have happened if the cashier had
had 15 minutes to decide on how much change to ...

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of knowledge of the basic
addition rules. He sits down with a sheet of paper with a list of many three
digit numbers. What kinds of errors can he commit, and why? While adding up the
numbers, he might mistake a 7 for a 1 and add the numbers together wrong. He
might, while adding, disregard a number once in a while. All these possible
mistakes would lead to the wrong final answer, but what causes these errors?
Once again, the time factor is very important. Given the chance to redo his
calculations another 99 times, he would certainly produce the correct final
answer. The reason he committed errors was simply that he was doing an action
faster that his brain and eyes could handle with ...

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