Say you're proofreading something someone else wrote and you find something right at the top of the page that doesn't make sense. So, you make a note about how to correct it and continue on. Then you find another problem, and you make a correction. Maybe you find another. By this point, you think the person who wrote it is sloppy or incompetent. You're feeling pretty smart and smug, and soon enough, you find something else that you think is a problem. But, while trying to come up with a correction, you discover that the problem was you: you were expecting to find problems and so you jumped on something that you simply didn't understand quickly enough and blamed that on the person who wrote it.
I see this all the time in my side business (software). A person finds a bug, sends me a worried report about it, I fix it. He finds another, sends me a "Oops, looks like I found another one!" report. I fix it. Now he thinks he's the best bug-finder ever, and/or that my program is rife with problems. So he quickly sends me a list of five or six new bugs that he thinks he's discovered. But the bugs in this last batch always turn out to be problems with his understanding.
Somewhere in the process, your brain switches from analyzer to attacker, and you start finding problems where there aren't any because you've convinced yourself that you're in a target-rich environment. You start mistaking your own lack of understanding for my lack of understanding.
Is there a name for this?
There’s confirmation bias involved, but that’s not the whole picture.
Not sure about this, but I saw the opposite when I was doing projection management that included work done by electricians. They would intentionally make small, easy to correct violations for the inspector to find. By the time the inspector was done a first pass, they had “fixed” all the problems and got their approvals.
The electricians told me that inspectors got a LOT tougher if they didn’t find anything on the first pass.
The electricians were ‘playing the game’ : which didn’t necessarily mean they had thought it through. Any inspector will be filling out a checklist so he looks efficient at identifying problems. Job Security ensured, he can be human again.
As to your comment – isn’t that merely a matter of ‘finding’ a pattern and chasing down its seeming iterations and proofs ? That’s a matter of logical inference superseding direct observation as an analytical tool : abstract logic and bias run wild.
Not catching it – could be due to inattention/laziness and possibly motivated by malice/competitiveness. Then again – what’s the reward for ‘missing’ possible incidences ?
Status games, anyone ?