TTC/The Great Courses – Alexander B. Swan – Understanding Cognitive Biases (2023)

This sentence is about 20 million bits. Your brain processes around 11 million bits each day, almost every second. And yet, that astonishing number just isn’t enough to get you through your day. Consequently, your brain takes some shortcuts—and it’s those shortcuts, called heuristics, that make it all work.

Some shortcuts are completely benign and helpful—such as your ability to recognize your child even if half his face is in shadow or your ability to imagine tomorrow even though you will never actually see it. However, other heuristics may be biased and can influence your decision.-Making an error. Inappropriate behavior

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Understanding Cognitive Biases

You will be able to identify these biases and counteract them when needed. In some cases, you can even use them to your advantage.

24 lectures of fascinating lecture by Dr. Alexander B. Swan This article uses examples from psychology experiments and history as well as movies, TV, comics and social media to illustrate the many cognitive biases that can affect us all. You’re not alone in your sometimes irrational judgments and interpretations of events or people. But you can learn how to make better decisions—no matter what shortcuts your brain wants to take!

How Many Biases?

Research shows that we all have close to 200 biases, even though it may shock you. Biased can refer to a bias, not a prejudice. A prejudice is a preconceived negative opinion of a group or person. In favor You can be for or against something. You might be biased towards healthy foods, blues, or certain music. Each of us has our own preferences, which are unlikely not to cause any adverse effects in our decisions-making.

The shortcuts of cognitive biases, however—when the brain fills in gaps of solid, reliable information with a lot of guesswork for efficiency’s sake—can lead to errors of memory and judgment, and can cause faulty decision-Unintended consequences can even be disastrous. Consider confirmation bias as an example. This tendency to consider only information that confirms our existing beliefs can cause us to make incorrect assumptions about the cause of a coworker’s behavior, misinterpret experimental data, or even make disastrous engineering decisions resulting in injuries … or worse.

This course will examine confirmation bias, stereotype use, predisposition to the status quo and many other biases.

• Pareidolia. This is our ability to discern meaning from random stimuli. Our brains are wired to recognize patterns and especially faces. In 1976, when the Viking 1 spacecraft photographed the Cydonia region of Mars, many people’s pareidolia caused them to see a face in the landscape that became associated with a supposed Martian civilization.
• Cryptomnesia. This is when a person believes they have created a thought or an idea, but the source is actually a memory. When your brain makes a decision to make a certain thought or idea, this is called a “source monitoring error”—storing a memory without storing its source. One of the most famous examples of cryptomnesia is Helen Keller’s publication of Frost KingAlthough she was You are certain Although her book was original, it wasn’t.
• Reactance. Think back to your teens, when you wanted something completely different from what you were told. Although you didn’t know it at the time, you were exhibiting reactance bias, the tendency to act in ways that are opposite to the rules in place, especially when you believe your freedom will be curtailed. This very common bias can lead to dangerous behavior. Sometimes the rules are set in place for a reason.

Unraveling the Bias

These cognitive biases can be so deeply embedded in our brain functioning that we don’t have control. Absolutely. In Understanding Cognitive Biases, Dr. Swan will discuss many tactics you can—and should—use to avoid the consequences of unchecked cognitive biases. These include:

• You can increase your awareness of Biases. Cognitive biases should be recognized when they occur. It’s amazing how easy it is to identify cognitive bias when it’s exhibited by someone else, but it’s much more difficult to recognize it in ourselves. But, this is an important first step to overcoming faulty reasoning.
• Slowing down. Dual-process thinking is what humans use. To move efficiently between tasks, we use heuristic and fast processing. This is where most cognitive biases occur. But we can also access slow, deliberate, logical processing—If we want to. Are we motivated, even though it may take some effort, to find solid, valid information beyond our own beliefs? Or are we content to just confirm our own worldview, whether or not it’s accurate?
• Journaling. Journaling can be a wonderful way to overcome cognitive bias for those who do it regularly. Journaling can be done during multi-tasking, for example.-Day vacations can help you discover the peak-End bias in how we remember memories. Group members can journal their experiences and thoughts to help fight groupthink. Journaling daily can also be a good way to prevent false memories from being created and maintained.

Use Cognitive You can achieve your goals with the help of Bias

Your brain may use some of these heuristics to compensate for its deficiencies “slow” You can also use processing to reach your goals. These include:

• Spacing Effect, Generation Effect, Testing Effect Understanding How to use these memory phenomena for your own benefit can improve your learning and memory retention.
• Observer Bias. The next time you’re trying to teach someone anything at all, you can certainly use the cues of observer bias—where we see what we expect rather than what is necessarily there—to improve response and learning.
• Status Quo Bias. Although this bias can sometimes make us feel afraid of change, it is also a tool we can use to evaluate situations and determine if the status quo is actually in our best interest.

Dr. Swan Leave the course with one last, important question. Understanding how cognitive biases affect our lives (biases) will help you to make better decisions. “sit quietly in the dark”Where do you want to go? Do you want the status-quo bias to prevail? Or, can you use your new knowledge to develop strategies to minimize or reduce their impact? You can choose.

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24 Lectures

Average time each is 27 minutes

✨Alexander B. Swan, PhD✨

Understanding Cognitive biases can help you to think critically about your thoughts and behavior.

InstitutionEureka College

Alma materUniversity of California Santa Barbara