I recently worked with an ABC crew filming episodes for their series The Interrogation Room, analyzing high-profile interrogations. One case in particular – the Chris Watts interview – raised a question that’s relevant far beyond criminal investigation: What brings a seemingly normal person to make a catastrophically irrational decision?
The easy answer is to label people who commit terrible acts as fundamentally different from us – evil, broken, other. But that’s intellectually lazy and prevents us from understanding the actual mechanism. The human brain, miraculous as it is, has predictable vulnerabilities under certain conditions. Understanding how these vulnerabilities operate matters whether you’re conducting a high-stakes interview, managing organizational crises, or simply trying to understand why intelligent people sometimes make baffling choices.
The Neuroscience of Catastrophic Decisions
Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters. Rather than debate whether he’s evil or simply psychologically compromised – which is unknowable and ultimately unproductive – let’s examine the cognitive processes that may have led to such an irrational act. Understanding the mechanism reveals something important about how human decision-making breaks down under stress.
Watts was experiencing chronic stress from multiple sources: significant financial pressure, a third child on the way, family conflict between his wife and parents. Chronic stress fundamentally alters brain chemistry. It creates a sense of chaos in our thinking and reduces the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotion and access the information needed for rational decisions.
But chronic stress alone doesn’t explain his actions. Several specific cognitive distortions compounded the problem:
Flawed comparison anchoring: We make decisions based on comparisons, which is why advertising places products in situations similar to our own – we compare ourselves to the scenario and decide to buy. Our subconscious searches for comparable situations to inform decisions. In the interview, Watts mentions a friend who divorced and seemed happy. Under stress, his mind appears to have distorted this to “my friend no longer has a wife and is happy, therefore I would be happier without a wife” – completely bypassing the actual mechanism (divorce) and its complexities.
Anchoring bias: Our brains anchor on initial or particularly salient information when making decisions. While his family was out of town for a month, Watts had an affair with someone who believed he was divorcing. He experienced an identity – fit, attractive, fun – that felt compelling. His decision-making anchored on this version of himself while discounting the father/husband aspects of his identity as less relevant to who he “really” was.
Acute stress triggering: According to Watts – and there’s no way to verify this – the morning of the murders he told his wife about the affair. She reportedly told him he would never see his children again. If true, this added acute stress to chronic stress, further degrading his capacity for rational decision-making.
The result: thought processes in chaos, constantly flooded with stress hormones, making inaccurate comparisons, anchoring on distorted information. To him, the decision likely felt rational in the moment. Understanding this mechanism doesn’t excuse the actions or minimize their impact – it simply reveals how human cognitive architecture can catastrophically fail under specific conditions.
The Interview Failure
The interrogators focused almost exclusively on obtaining a confession. They succeeded partially – Watts admitted to killing his wife but blamed her for the children’s deaths. This was not an optimal outcome. To avoid the death penalty, he later pled guilty to all murders but didn’t actually admit to them in the interview. Only months after the case was fully adjudicated, in a new interview, did he finally acknowledge the full truth.
We can’t rely on these later opportunities. We need to get it right the first time.
The interrogators had everything they needed for a complete admission. Watts gave them the chronic stressors, the distorted comparisons, the anchoring on his affair-based identity. They treated this as irrelevant background noise and pushed for confession. Had they slowed down – remembering that slow is fast in these contexts – and explored what was happening in his life, they likely would have helped him understand why he’d done what he’d done. Because I genuinely believe he didn’t know why in that moment.
Understanding the mechanism of his decision-making wasn’t tangential to getting the truth. It was the pathway to it.
The Organizational Parallel: The Boeing 737 MAX
Most organizational decisions don’t involve life and death—except when they do. The Boeing 737 MAX case demonstrates how the same cognitive mechanisms that operated in Watts operate in corporate decision-making, with equally catastrophic results.
In 2011, Airbus launched the A320neo with fuel-efficient engines that began capturing Boeing’s market share. Boeing leadership faced chronic stress: competitive pressure, financial targets, shareholder expectations, and the looming threat of losing dominance in the single-aisle aircraft market. They had to respond, and fast.
Rather than design a new aircraft from scratch—the engineering solution—they anchored on a faster, cheaper option: redesign the existing 737 with larger, more efficient engines. This created an aerodynamic problem: the new engine placement made the aircraft prone to pitching up during certain flight conditions. Instead of addressing this through structural changes, they implemented a software fix—the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
The cognitive distortions stack up identically to the Watts case:
Flawed comparison: Leadership appears to have anchored on the comparison “Airbus upgraded their existing platform successfully, therefore we can upgrade ours”—missing critical differences in the engineering challenges involved. The 737 airframe was designed in the 1960s; stretching it further created problems that the A320 redesign didn’t face.
Anchoring bias: The entire decision-making process anchored on speed to market and cost efficiency. Boeing’s marketing promise was that pilots wouldn’t need extensive retraining—which drove the decision to rely on a single sensor for MCAS and not inform pilots about the system. Engineering concerns about safety were filtered through the financial constraint rather than the other way around.
Chronic stress degrading judgment: Boeing was operating under sustained competitive pressure after its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas shifted the culture from engineering excellence toward financial performance. By 2011, this cultural stress was chronic. Boeing executives had spent years in an environment where financial metrics consistently trumped engineering caution. Their cognitive architecture for decision-making had been shaped by years of rewarding speed and cost-cutting over thoroughness.
Acute stress triggering: When the first 737 MAX crashed in October 2018, killing 189 people, Boeing’s initial response was to blame pilot error and issue reassurances that the aircraft was safe. This added acute crisis stress to the chronic competitive pressure. Rather than grounding the fleet and investigating thoroughly, they maintained their anchored position that the aircraft was fundamentally sound. Four months later, the second crash killed 157 more people.
The decisions felt rational to Boeing leadership in the moment. They were competing, protecting shareholder value, meeting market demands. Looking back, everyone wonders how smart people with access to engineering expertise could have made such catastrophically wrong choices. The answer is the same as with Watts: thought processes operating in chaos, anchoring on misleading comparisons, chronic stress degrading judgment, acute stress pushing them past the point of rational decision-making.
Engineers had flagged concerns about MCAS before the crashes. These warnings were filtered through a decision-making framework already compromised by stress and anchoring bias. The information didn’t make it through because the cognitive architecture receiving it was degraded.
The same principle applies broadly to organizational communication failures. When you’re trying to understand why someone made a decision that seems irrational – why the executive greenlit that project, why the manager handled that situation poorly, why the employee violated clear policy – the default approach mirrors the interrogators’ strategy with Watts: push for acknowledgment of the error, focus on the outcome rather than the process that produced it.
This rarely produces genuine understanding or behavioral change. People become defensive, minimize, or shift blame – much as Watts initially did and much as Boeing initially did. They might eventually acknowledge the mistake to avoid consequences, but without understanding the cognitive mechanism that produced it, the pattern continues.
A Different Approach to Difficult Conversations
Whether you’re conducting an internal investigation, managing a performance issue, or trying to understand a strategic decision that went wrong, the effective approach is counterintuitive: slow down and explore the context that shaped the decision rather than immediately focusing on the decision itself.
What stressors were operating? What information were they anchoring on? What comparisons were they making that might have seemed apt in the moment but missed crucial differences? What acute pressures might have pushed them past their capacity for sound judgment?
This isn’t about excusing poor decisions – it’s about understanding the mechanism that produced them. People often don’t actually know why they made the choices they did, especially decisions made under stress. Helping them reconstruct the cognitive process isn’t just compassionate; it’s the most reliable path to accurate information and genuine behavioral change.
When someone understands how their thinking broke down, they’re far more likely to actually acknowledge what happened and implement different decision processes going forward. When they just feel accused and cornered, they minimize, deflect, and repeat the pattern.
Practical Applications
For leaders managing high-stakes situations or conducting difficult conversations:
Recognize that pressure degrades cognition. When decisions seem incomprehensibly bad, don’t assume incompetence or malice – look for what chronic or acute stressors might have been operating. This applies to your own decision-making as well. If you’re under sustained pressure, your judgment is compromised whether you feel it or not.
Slow down to speed up. The instinct under pressure is to move faster, decide quicker, get to resolution. This amplifies the cognitive vulnerabilities that create poor decisions. Building in structured reflection time – even brief pauses to identify what you’re anchoring on or what comparison you’re making – significantly improves outcomes.
In difficult conversations, explore context before demanding acknowledgment. Whether it’s a performance issue, a policy violation, or a strategic failure, resist the urge to immediately focus on the problematic decision. Instead, reconstruct the conditions and cognitive processes that produced it. People will give you this information if you’re genuinely interested rather than building a case.
Help people understand their own thinking. Often the person who made the poor decision doesn’t actually understand why they did it – they’re rationalizing post-hoc rather than accessing the actual mechanism. Helping them reconstruct the thought process isn’t therapy; it’s practical, because without understanding the mechanism, they can’t change it.
Design systems that account for cognitive vulnerability. If critical decisions are being made by individuals under chronic stress, you’re systemically producing bad outcomes. Build decision processes that distribute cognitive load, create structured reflection points, and reduce reliance on any single person’s judgment when stakes are high and stress is chronic.
The Chris Watts interview is difficult to watch not because of the crime’s brutality – though that’s certainly part of it – but because the interrogators had everything they needed to get the full truth and they didn’t recognize it and they fell back into fruitless patterns. They treated the psychological context as irrelevant background when it was actually the mechanism of both the crime and the pathway to confession.
The same pattern plays out in organizations daily, just with lower stakes. We treat the context that shaped decisions as background noise and wonder why we can’t get straight answers, why problems recur, why smart people keep making the same mistakes.
Understanding how stress degrades decision-making isn’t about being soft on poor performance. It’s about being effective in improving it. The question isn’t whether to hold people accountable – it’s whether you want accountability theater or actual behavioral change.
Real change requires understanding the mechanism. And understanding the mechanism requires the patience to slow down and explore context rather than pushing immediately for acknowledgment and resolution.
Slow is fast. It was true on the range, it was true in the interrogation room, and it’s true for your next difficult conversation.
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Somoetic Intelligence Group specializes in science-based approaches to high-stakes communication, decision-making under pressure, and organizational effectiveness. Our methodologies are grounded in research from intelligence, law enforcement, and psychological science. Learn more at somoetic.com.