What Middlemarch teaches us about bias, blame, psychological safety and just culture
A scratched mirror, a single candle and a character convinced that she sits at the centre of events offer a surprisingly modern lesson: the story that feels complete to us may only be the story our position allows us to see.
Rosamund Vincy and “what you see is all there is”
Whilst recently reading George Eliot’s incredible novel Middlemarch, one section stayed with me as a vivid literary example of Daniel Kahneman’s phrase “what you see is all there is”, often shortened to WYSIATI.
Rosamund Vincy is sheltered, spoiled and vain, and she suffers from what we might now rather unscientifically call “main character syndrome”. Eliot captures this beautifully through the image of a scratched pier glass. Place a candle close to the glass and the random scratches seem to arrange themselves into concentric circles around the light. The scratches have not changed. The candle has not revealed an underlying order. It has simply created the appearance of one.
That is Rosamund’s worldview. She interprets conversations, choices and disappointments as though they naturally organise themselves around her. Interactions that are messy, partial or random acquire a pattern in which she becomes the central object of discussion and reasoning. Eliot illuminates, quite literally, how a point of view can distort reality without feeling distorted to the person looking.
The confidence of a complete story
Kahneman’s WYSIATI principle describes our tendency to build the best story we can from the information immediately available, while giving too little weight to what may be absent. The mind values coherence. When the facts in front of us fit together neatly, confidence can rise even if the evidence is incomplete.
Kahneman and Tversky’s earlier research also showed how heuristics can make difficult judgements manageable while producing predictable errors, including availability, representativeness and anchoring effects (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
We all see the world through our own lens. We interpret events through our memories, roles, emotions, expectations and previous experiences. In Eliot’s metaphor, each of us can become the candle. The apparent pattern wraps around our own position and encourages us to mistake a persuasive interpretation for the whole truth.
This is not a character flaw. Heuristics are part of ordinary human cognition. They help us act when time, attention and information are limited. The problem begins when a quick, coherent account becomes the only account we are willing to consider.
Why this matters for women and human factors
Human factors asks us to look beyond the isolated individual and examine how people interact with tasks, tools, environments, teams and organisational systems. A gender-sensitive human factors lens adds an essential question: whose body, experience and perspective have been treated as the default?
Research on the gender data gap warns that women can be under-represented in the evidence used to design products, technologies, processes and policies. Read and colleagues (2022) argue that structured human factors and ergonomics methods can expose and address these systemic gaps. Parnell and Plant similarly propose a sociotechnical approach that considers gender at micro, meso and macro levels rather than treating inclusion as a late-stage adjustment (Parnell & Plant, 2024).
This matters because a system may appear neutral from the viewpoint of the people who designed it. The pattern looks complete because the missing experience is not visible from where the candle has been placed. Women’s human factors is therefore not about suggesting that all women think or experience systems in the same way. It is about recognising that evidence, participation and design have not always represented the full range of people who must use and work within those systems.
From a single story to blame culture
After an error or adverse event, organisations can create their own version of Rosamund’s mirror. A visible action becomes the candle. Everything else is interpreted in relation to it. The person closest to the outcome is made central, while workload, staffing, equipment, competing goals, team communication, supervision, design and the realities of work are pushed into the shadows.
A blame culture is attractive because it offers a clean story. Someone did something; therefore, that person caused the outcome. It provides emotional certainty and the appearance of control. Yet a neat account is not necessarily a useful one. If an investigation begins with an individual conclusion and works backwards, confirmation bias and hindsight bias can make the scratches appear more ordered than they were at the time.
Sidney Dekker implores us to 'get in the tunnel' when investigating a series of events. To understand what happened we need to see the perspectives of those involved.
A human factors response asks these types of questions:
What made the action reasonable, understandable or possible in that context?
What information was available to the people involved at the time, not only afterwards?
Which conditions shaped attention, workload, judgement and communication?
Whose account has been heard, and whose experience is missing?
What needs to change in the system to reduce the chance of recurrence?
Psychological safety makes the missing information visible
Psychological safety is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Edmondson’s research found that psychological safety was associated with team learning behaviour, including the willingness to discuss errors, ask questions and seek feedback (Edmondson, 1999).
This is not softness and it is not freedom from accountability. It is the practical condition that allows inconvenient information to enter the room. Without psychological safety, people edit what they say. They withhold uncertainty, soften challenge and keep quiet about weak signals. Leaders are then left with a coherent but incomplete picture and may mistake the absence of challenge for agreement.
For women and others whose knowledge has historically been overlooked, this point is particularly important. Being invited into a room is not the same as being able to influence what happens there. Diverse participation only improves learning when people can contribute their perspective without being dismissed, stereotyped or penalised for disrupting the preferred narrative.
Diverse perspectives improve the quality of the picture
A wider range of perspectives does not automatically produce good decisions. It can create friction, ambiguity and competing interpretations. That is precisely why it can be valuable. Difference interrupts the seductive ease of a single story and gives a team more opportunities to notice what its dominant viewpoint has missed.
Research into collective intelligence found that group performance across varied tasks was associated with social sensitivity and more equal conversational turn-taking; it was also correlated with a higher proportion of women in the groups studied (Woolley et al., 2010). The lesson is not that women possess a single, uniform way of thinking. It is that teams benefit when participation is less concentrated and when members pay attention to one another’s signals.
Diversity, then, is not a decorative value. It is part of how organisations test assumptions, widen the evidence base and grow. Different professional disciplines, life experiences, cultural backgrounds, genders and positions in a system can reveal different scratches in the glass. None provides the entire truth alone. Together, they make overconfidence in a partial account harder to sustain.
Just culture: accountability without the comfort of easy blame
A just culture aims to replace reflexive blame with fair accountability and learning. It does not assume every action is acceptable, nor does it remove personal responsibility. It distinguishes between human error, risky choices, system influences and conduct that genuinely warrants sanction, while resisting the urge to treat the outcome alone as proof of culpability.
Research in healthcare describes just culture as a shift towards learning rather than blaming after incidents. Van Baarle and colleagues (2022) found that open communication, attention to different perspectives, space for emotion and visible management commitment all matter, while also recognising the continuing challenge of balancing openness, privacy and accountability. An integrative review similarly identified leadership commitment, education and training, accountability and open communication as recurring requirements for implementation (Murray et al., 2023).
This is demanding work. Blame is quick. Learning is slower. Blame narrows the frame. Learning keeps asking what has not yet been seen. A mature just culture is willing to hold two ideas at once: people should be accountable for their choices, and those choices must be understood within the system that shaped them.
Moving the candle
The value of Eliot’s candle anecdote is not simply that Rosamund is self-centred. It is that the illusion is so convincing. From her position, the circles really do appear to be there. The same is true for all of us. Intelligence, experience and good intentions do not make us immune to bias. Sometimes they simply make us better at explaining the pattern we already believe we can see.
For leaders, investigators and improvement teams, the practical challenge is to move the candle:
seek accounts that complicate the first explanation;
separate what was known at the time from what is obvious in hindsight;
look for system conditions before settling on individual blame;
create enough psychological safety for uncertainty and dissent to be voiced;
include women and other under-represented groups in research, design and decision-making from the beginning
treat accountability as a route to learning, not a substitute for it.
The aim is not to remove judgement. It is to improve it. We develop when we recognise that our view is a view, not the view; that confidence is not completeness; and that another person’s experience may reveal part of the system we cannot see from our own position.
Perhaps this is where literature and human factors meet most powerfully. Both ask us to step outside ourselves, become curious about context and resist the easy certainty of a single story. The scratches were always there. The work is to stop assuming they were arranged around us.
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