People--especially Americans--are by and large optimists. They're
much better at imagining best-case scenarios (I could win the
lottery!) than worst-case scenarios (A hurricane could destroy my
neighborhood!). This is true not just of their approach to
imagining the future, but of their memories as well: people are
better able to describe the best moments of their lives than they
are the worst. Though there are psychological reasons for this
phenomenon, Karen A.Cerulo, in Never Saw It Coming, considers
instead the role of society in fostering this attitude. What kinds
of communities develop this pattern of thought, which do not, and
what does that say about human ability to evaluate possible
outcomes of decisions and events? Cerulo takes readers to diverse
realms of experience, including intimate family relationships, key
transitions in our lives, the places we work and play, and the
boardrooms of organizations and bureaucracies. Using interviews,
surveys, artistic and fictional accounts, media reports, historical
data, and official records, she illuminates one of the most common,
yet least studied, of human traits--a blatant disregard for
worst-case scenarios. Never Saw It Coming, therefore, will be
crucial to anyone who wants to understand human attempts to picture
or plan the future. "In Never Saw It Coming, Karen Cerulo argues
that in American society there is a 'positive symmetry, ' a
tendency to focus on and exaggerate the best, the winner, the most
optimistic outcome and outlook. Thus, the conceptions of the worst
are underdeveloped and elided. Naturally, as she masterfully
outlines, there are dramatic consequences to this characterological
inability to imagine and prepare for the worst, as the failure to
heed memos leading up to both the 9/11 and NASA Challenger
disasters, for instance, so painfully reminded us."--Robin
Wagner-Pacifici, Swarthmore College "Katrina, 9/11, and the War in
Iraq--all demonstrate the costliness of failing to anticipate
worst-case scenarios. Never Saw It Coming explains why it is so
hard to do so: adaptive behavior hard-wired into human cognition is
complemented and reinforced by cultural practices, which are in
turn institutionalized in the rules and structures of formal
organizations. But Karen Cerulo doesn't just diagnose the problem;
she uses case studies of settings in which people effectively
anticipate and deal with potential disaster to describe structural
solutions to the chronic dilemmas she describes so well. Never Saw
It Coming is a powerful contribution to the emerging fields of
cognitive and moral sociology."--Paul DiMaggio, Princeton
University
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