Course Review: Unconscious Bias (LinkedIn Learning)

Review

Unconscious Bias is a small but interesting ~20 minutes course about some biases that often get triggered unawaredly and we might not even know we have. We'll learn about 5 biases:

• Affinity bias
• Halo bias
• Perception bias
• Confirmation bias
• Groupthink

It's a tiny but appealing teaching, could be longer and go more in depth to be better, but on the other hand is a quick learning pill.

Notes

To complement, I'll leave here some notes I had about the topic, mostly a list I gathered some time ago (sadly din't noted from where):

• Anchoring Bias: People are over-reliant on first piece of information they hear.
• Availability heuristic: People overestimate the importance of information that is available to them.
• Bandwagon effect: The propbability of one person adopting a belief increases based on the number of people who holad that belief. (groupthink)
• Blind-spot bias: Failing to recognize your own cognitive biases is a bias in itself. People notice cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in themselves.
• Choice-supportive bias: When you choose something, you tend to feld positive about it, even if that choice has flaws.
• Clustering illusion: The tendency to see patterns in random events.
• Confirmation bias: We tend to listen only to information that confirms our preconceptions.
• Conservatism bias: Where people favor evidence or information that has emerged. (we are slow to accept)
• Information bias: Tendency to seek information when it does not affect action. (more information is not always better)
• Ostrich effect: Decision to ignore dangerous or negative information.
• Outcome bias: Judging a decision based on the outcome, not on how the decision was made in the moment.
• Overconfidence: Too confident about our abilities, which leads to taking greater risks.
• Placebo effect: When simply believing that something will have a certain effect on you causes it to have that effect.
• Pro-innovation bias: When a proponent of an innovation tends to overvalue its usefulness and undervalue its limitations.
• Recency: Tendency to weight the latest information more heavily than older data.
• Salience: Tendency to focus on the most easily recognizable features.
• Selective perception: Allowing expectations to influence how we percieve the world.
• Stereotyping: Expecting a group or person to have certain qualities without having real information about the person. (we tend to overuse and abuse it)
• Survivorship bias: Focusing only on surviving examples, causing us to misjudge a situation.
• Zero-risk bias: We love certainty, even if it's counterproductive.

And also I'll leave a link to Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases, which includes a lot more.