Rat5, confusion is what we humans will always do!
Another way of looking at it, cognitive biases and heuristics are the mental equivalent of the way a lens bends light. Our mindis the lens, it literally bends what we see based on our preconception. Stated another way, our perception is dependant upon what we believe. We process randomness until we "understand" the chaos AND THEN STOP PROCESSING, and move on to the next task. We superb pattern recognition machines, and we will always attempt to make sense and interpret what we perceive. Watch the short video below.
Did you attribute intention and make up a story to go along with these geometric shapes moving around a board? That is our faulty cognitive machinery at work.
A smart guy once remarked that the first impulsive thought to a GPWS "PULL UP" is likely to be utter disbelief, followed by "nah, its spurious" because by definition we are confused about where the aircraft is if we get this warning.
Our mental model says we are one place, the aircraft knows we aren't. We would not be in the approaching terrain willingly, so we are confused! Our instinctive response is to blame the machine for it's confusion, we aren't confused! I suspect this is the case with most CFIT, the crew are very happy with where they think they are, until they aren't
I made a similar post over on the Dubai B777 accident,
post#1371 with some more thoughts on confusion. I don't believe this mental state is well understood or researched.
A soft entry into this is Michael Lewis's recent book, "The Undoing Project". If you like this, then move onto Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" and even Nassim Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness". Those books are the more general cases, not aviation specific, however there is lots that we can take away as pilots.