Bias Awareness
What Works to Build Mental Immunity - #3
If you’re human, biases distort your thinking. In fact, there are over 200 documented cognitive biases!1 Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that our thinking is hopelessly corrupt. The takeaway is that we need to guard against some all-too-human tendencies. If we’re humble and careful, we can compensate for our biases and become clearer, more capable thinkers. For example, knowing that we’re prone to confirmation bias can make us less certain and more attentive to disconfirming evidence. We’re also prone to imagine causal connections that don’t really exist. Knowing this, you can make a habit of asking “Do we really know that this thing causes that thing?”
Applications
Focus on teaching students a few of the most common biases, like confirmation bias, negativity bias, motivated reasoning, and the availability heuristic, along with examples. “Yourbias.is” is a fantastic resource.2 The Lowdown also has a good lesson plan for this.3
Ask students the questions, “Could biases be coloring our views about this? Which one(s) might be at work here, and how might they be distorting our judgment?” Encourage them to raise such questions themselves.
Try a Mad Lib-like word game to help students explore the subject of unconscious bias.4
Notes
It’s important to learn about biases in an active way. Simply having students memorize lists of biases won’t help them understand or apply that knowledge. We want students to be aware that biases creep into everyone’s thinking. There’s no shame in this: it just means we need to practice spotting it, then making allowances. Often, this means dialing down the conviction influenced by the bias.
This is the 3rd post in our “What Works” series for educators and researchers. We are open to incorporating feedback into these modules before we publish them on our website. Please comment on this post to provide suggestions. We are particularly interested in additional applications, resources, and readings. All constructive feedback is welcomed, even if we don’t add it to the finalized version.
Thank you!
In other news..
We published a policy brief!
We published an article written for policymakers about the importance of cognitive immunology. It was published in AFCEA’s SIGNAL Magazine last week. Read it here: The Critical Importance of Cognitive Immunology.