Bias

The Historical Method – You Learn Something Old Every Day

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“You learn something old every day.” X the Owl, a character in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood This article is inspired by a comment on the askHistorians subreddit. It highlights a fundamental difference in how historians approach facts compared to those from fields like science or engineering (my own background). Many assume historians can offer definitive truths about past events, but the reality is more nuanced. And one thing that I, and I suspect others around here who’ve been trained as historians, learn is that the …

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A Small Collection of Feminist Perspectives

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This article is a curated collection of quotes from various perspectives regarding women’s discrimination and the resilience of those who have tried to dismantle systemic biases. This compilation is highly personal, and I hope the following voices will resonate with you, too. Historical Underrepresentation The French philosopher Gilles Ménage, from the XVII-th century, found references to sixty-five women philosophers in ancient texts and works by the fathers of the Church. However, modern philosophy encyclopedias, apart from Hypatia (a renowned mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer who lived in Alexandria, …

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Understanding How the Brain Constructs Our Perception of Reality

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As Professor Alexandru Babeș explains, the human brain contains nearly 100 billion neurons (a number comparable to all the stars in our galaxy) and at least as many glial cells that play an essential role in brain function. On average, each neuron connects with (and receives information from) about 10,000 other neurons, resulting in approximately 10 to the power of 15 synapses (as the contacts between two neurons are called), that is, a quadrillion synapse. Our brain is an incredibly complicated mechanism, so Emily Dickinson’s poem, …

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How to Counteract Disinformation

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The last few years exposed more than ever the fragility of our information ecosystem. Elections, Brexit, social unrest, COVID-19 conspiracies, and the war in Ukraine have been used as disinformation operations by certain actors to undermine faith in governments, raise fear and anger, confuse and manipulate us.  Disinformation is information meant to deceive (trolls posting fake news). In contrast, misinformation is false information with no malicious intent (our friends and family genuinely believe in disinformative content and willingly share it).  Why is Disinformation Effective?  …

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How to Reduce Biased Thinking

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The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any.  Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson – Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)   Every day an overflow of thoughts dashes through our minds as we must adapt as efficiently and quickly as possible to everchanging environments. We can’t process all streams of information around us at once, so we turn to mental shortcuts …

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An Overview of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Its Effects on Us

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Cognitive dissonance is a theory proposed by Leon Festinger in the 1950s related to how we react in the face of conflicting behaviours and cognitions (ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions). According to this theory, people strive to keep their knowledge, attitudes or behaviours consistent (consonant). So, when we encounter contradictory information, we try to reduce contradicting (dissonant) cognitions and restore equilibrium by altering our attitudes, beliefs or behaviours.   Festinger argued that to cope with contradictory ideas or experiences, some of us would blindly believe what we …

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Dilemmas in Approaching Scientific Content

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Understanding some basic neuroscience can be highly liberating as it can undo some of our apparently irreversible limitations or failings. As you can imagine, much of this content is based on scientific research. Reading studies about neuroscience, procrastination, productivity, etc., is where the waters become muddier because scientific research often has an agenda that can lead to the “file drawer problem” or publication bias. This bias states that research results that don’t validate the researchers’ hypothesis tend to end up in the file drawers. …

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How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) This article will present other techniques that women (who usually experience gender stereotyping or/and are caregivers) choose to follow in their work aspirations. As in the previous article, most of this research is based on Mason Currey’s excellent books, Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work.   Hidden in plain sight   Costume designer Edith Head created the …

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