There is no place like home. There is no place like home. There is no place like home. There is no place like home. While repeating the ending line to the Wizard of Oz may have worked well enough for Dorothy, it doesn’t work in the same way for us. Or…
What do Flat-earthers, Anti-vaxxers, 9/11-conspiracists, Jesus-mythicists and Obama citizenship deniers have in common? Well, subconsciously at least, they all display a contempt for Bayes’ theorem, and arguably they strongly manifest the ‘Backfire effect.’ Welcome to another instalment of Cognitive Bias Wednesday, today looking at the ‘backfire effect,’ with a prelude…
‘Why did that person just run that red light? They obviously don’t know how to drive.’ We hear it all the time, the tendency to attribute malice or incompetence to another individual or group, when if it was us doing the action it would be merely an accident: ‘I just didn’t…
Before we get into the Wednesday series on cognitive biases and fallacies in full swing I thought it would be good to look at a simple case study that not only applies to how we fall into biases unconsciously, but also teaches us a little about how we process information.…
In Australia it is that time of year again… summer. Where the weather gets nicer, and in Adelaide the Tour Down Under arrives in town. Now unsurprisingly this annual event sees the seasonal rise of visible cyclists, and of course accompanying it the usual diatribes and vitriol flashing about in…
Some will probably know that I have been interested in issues of identity formation, adoption and social identity for quite some time now. While this is not the time or place to engage in a long discussion of the factors of Tajfelian Social Identity Theory, I think that the issues we…
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