Cognitive Bias: How Does Cognitive Bias Undermine Good Reasoning, and How Can We Counteract Its Influence?
This pathway introduces the concept of cognitive bias and identifies heuristic reasoning and motivated reasoning as the two main sources of cognitive bias. Learners will become familiar with confirmation bias, key heuristic biases (availability and representativeness), and a variety of motivated biases (self-serving bias, groupthink, and more). Since minimizing the influence of cognitive bias is a central goal of the scientific method, learners will explore how standard scientific practices are designed to mitigate bias. These techniques can also help to improve our everyday reasoning. Learners will explore how a difficult college admissions decision can be distorted by cognitive bias and identify a variety of reasoning strategies that are effective tools for minimizing the effect of bias on complex reasoning and decision-making tasks.