The following is an application of the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) to the Route 91 Harvest shooter case, the mass murder of 58 persons attending an open-air music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 1 October 2017. The case came to a dissatisfying close in early 2019 with investigators announcing a motive was notContinue reading “ACH: The Route 91 Harvest Shooting”
Tag Archives: assumptions
Robert Hanssen Spy Case Illustrates The Difficulty of Overcoming Mindsets
Major intelligence failures are usually caused by failures of analysis, not failures of collection. Relevant information is discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected or overlooked because it fails to fit a prevailing mental model or mind-set. Richards J. Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis Focusing on a single scenario early in an analysis can lead to a mindsetContinue reading “Robert Hanssen Spy Case Illustrates The Difficulty of Overcoming Mindsets”
Culture And The Challenge Of Mirror Imaging
Analysts in the IC are often called on to explain the behaviors, motives, and intent of actors outside of the United States. Explaining human behavior and interpreting thought is extraordinarily difficult even within one’s own culture, but it adds an extra dimension of complexity when we discuss persons whose cultures we don’t share. Mirror imaging,Continue reading “Culture And The Challenge Of Mirror Imaging”
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