Blog

“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” – Bertrand Russel

Bronner (2015) explained that most information reaching us is analyzed almost instantly. Our brain is continually seeking to minimize the mental efforts requested by the multiple cognitive tasks – and thus their energy cost.

That is often insufficient to overcome the sociocultural and cognitive bias to which we are exposed.

Stereotypes often distort our intuitive interpretation of events.

We face at least three types of fundamental limitations:

• The dimensional They are related to our particular position in time and space (physical and social). Only some information reaches us; they vary according to our social environment, the country we live in, etc.
• The cultural Our socio-economic and cultural frameworks suggest some automatic, and sometimes distorted, interpretations of the phenomena we are confronted with.
• The cognitive The memory, abstract thinking… capacities of the brain are often overwhelmed by the complexity of the situations we are facing. The more or less conscious use of some automatic reasoning mode can lead to major errors such as:
  • The confusion between correlation and causality;
  • The confirmation bias which makes us pay more attention to, and better at remembering, information that are close to our opinion.
  • The overestimation of low probabilities;
  • The loss aversion (a higher sensitivity to costs than to profits);
  • [The retrospective bias, the negativity bias, the halo effect, the white coat effect];
  • Etc.