Margaret Heffernan Books

To understand why competition became so deeply ingrained in our psyche, we must trace its roots. The modern obsession with rivalry didn’t materialize overnight. It’s the product of centuries of economic and cultural conditioning. Much of it stems from the triumph of free-market ideology: Adam Smith’...

From A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better Than the Competition

Competition doesn’t just shape our systems—it shapes our minds. Psychological research shows that rivalry triggers stress responses similar to threat detection. Our focus narrows, empathy diminishes, and creativity declines. In competitive settings, people tend to take fewer risks, fearing that fail...

From A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better Than the Competition

The most dangerous truths are often the ones that threaten our sense of safety. Heffernan argues that willful blindness begins in the mind’s natural preference for coherence, predictability, and emotional comfort. Human beings are not neutral information processors. We notice what confirms our belie...

From Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

Most people do not want to stand apart from the group, even when the group is wrong. One of Heffernan’s central insights is that willful blindness is sustained by social forces as much as by private psychology. We like to imagine ourselves as independent thinkers, but in organizations, families, and...

From Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

Big failures rarely arrive without warning; more often, they are the end point of ignored signals. Heffernan examines corporate disasters to show that organizational collapse is seldom caused by a total absence of information. The clues are usually there: customer complaints, internal audits, unusua...

From Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

Silence often looks passive, but it is usually shaped by powerful incentives. Heffernan explains that people do not ignore obvious problems only because they fail to notice them. They also stay silent because speaking up can be costly. Fear of punishment, exclusion, humiliation, lost income, or dama...

From Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril