21 July 2017

The Cognitive Bias Survival Guide

Posted by Dan Satterfield

As a reporter in Tampa was doing a story on an Alligator in the road yesterday, someone drove past and screamed “Fake News!”  I suspect the gator was real, and the story was factual, but this is happening rather frequently. You might ask how people can be so deceived that they will accept news only from those who tell them what they want to hear. Unfortunately, this is the America we now live in.

This is a cognitive bias of course, so when I got an email today from Brittnay McKinlay about her Cognitive Bias Survival Guide, I was intrigued! It’s excellent and well worth reading, and here’s why. Cognitive bias can make you look ridiculous without having a clue that people are laughing at you. Here’s a fictional example: What if the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (with no background in science) told every major science body on Earth that they were wrong about climate change, and had no scientific evidence to back it up.  That’s most likely a cognitive bias.

Obviously, this is an extreme example that would never happen in the real world….
Click the image below to get it. I’ll save this, and so should you!