140 Courses Starting at Stanford Continuing Studies Next Week: Explore the Catalogue of Campus and Online Courses

by DC, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/140-courses-starting-at-stanford-continuing-studies-next-week.html

Quick fyi: I spend my days at Stanford Continuing Studies, where we've developed a rich lineup of online courses for lifelong learners, many of which will get started next week. The courses aren't free. But they're first rate, giving adult students--no matter where they live--the chance to work with dedicated teachers and students.

The catalogue includes a large number of online Creative Writing courses, covering the Novel, the Memoir, Creative Nonfiction, Travel Writing, Poetry and more. For the professional, the program offers online business courses in subjects like Entrepreneurship: From Ideas to Funding, An Introduction to Project Management: The Basics for Success and Finding Product/Market Fit: Using Design Research for New Product Success.

And there's a growing number of online Liberal Arts courses too. Take for example Constitutional Law, An Introduction to Jane Austen and Diet and Gene Expression: You Are What You Eat.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out the larger catalogue. Stanford Continuing Studies has 140 courses getting started this Spring quarter (next week), most taking place in Stanford's classrooms. The two flagship courses of the quarter include: The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci: A 500th Anniversary Celebration and 20^th-Century American Literature: An Intellectual Bus Tour with Michael Krasny, the host of KQED’s Forum.

Postgrad Realities: Juggling a PhD and Reaching the Finish Line

by David Richardson, PhD Life:  https://phdlife.warwick.ac.uk/2018/10/24/postgrad-realities-juggling-a-phd-and-reaching-the-finish-line/

Did you know that three of the major challenges postgraduate students are facing were cited as “fear of being judged”, “stress”, and “loneliness”? Starting a Masters or PhD can be a very isolating experience on a long and difficult journey. David Richardson offers an insight into Postgrad Realities, a set of online modules loaded with practical tips and strategies to tackle the twists and turns of your postgraduate journey …

So you’ve breezed your way through undergraduate study, you’ve been accepted onto a postgraduate degree placement at Warwick, you’ve learned everything about campus and your department at Welcome Week – and now the hard work begins. Whether you’re starting a Masters or PhD, you’re at the start of a long and difficult journey.

And while you know a fair bit of what to expect – after all, you’ve been at university before and achieved high grades – the set of challenges you’ll encounter as a postgraduate are going to be quite different. That’s why in 2016, the  Postgraduate Community Engagement Team joined forces with Wellbeing Support Services to create Postgrad Realities, a set of online modules to both introduce students to the problems and obstacles that crop up during postgraduate study, and practical ways to approach and overcome them.

The new reality

A 2015 NUS survey showed that 8 out of 10 students experience mental health issues. According to Student Minds, three of the major challenges to students’ mental health were cited as “fear of being judged”, “stress”, and “loneliness” – and unfortunately, these can be even more prominent as a postgraduate student.

As a PhD student, your work will be scrutinised and criticised – whether it’s in print as your chapter, article or thesis, or delivered as a conference paper. Critical analysis of your work means you will always be told ways of how it could be improved – and that can be disheartening. Furthermore, your stress levels in dealing with the high workload of your postgraduate studies can be exacerbated by a whole host of other demands on your time. You may have a job outside of your study, such as teaching commitments in your department or an employer who is sponsoring or funding your postgraduate study, and at some point in your hectic schedule; you’ll need to find time for friends, family and life.

This is even more important when you consider how isolating postgraduate study can be. Independent study is a big part of being an undergraduate, but then you would on the same degree programme with many other students, and that peer support network is important. As a Masters student, that peer support base narrows, and as a PhD student, it’s often just you and your subject.

But while you may feel isolated as a postgraduate, it’s important to remember that you are not alone in facing these challenges. And that’s where Postgrad Realities comes in – to introduce you to some of the obstacles that you will encounter as a postgraduate and to equip you with the right set of strategies and practical tips to help support you throughout your postgrad journey. By working through Postgrad Realities, you will hopefully develop the resilience needed to tackle the challenges of a Masters or PhD, and feel encouraged to discuss wellbeing challenges in the knowledge that they are common amongst the postgraduate community.

Postgrad Realities

Postgrad Realities consists of five self-paced, interactive online modules – these are always there when you need them, and you can dip in and out of the modules at any time. Each module provides you with information, including video and audio from postgraduates giving their own experiences and reflections, and gives you the space to reflect on your own values and personality and how they relate to your studies.

But importantly, it’s not just all theory – the modules give you practical tips and strategies to utilise, and activities to try in your own time to help. Take Module B for example, designed to help you gain an insight into your own personality style and utilise your strengths – for dealing with moments of social isolation by building new connections, the module gives you activities to work on such as improving your active listening, and taking 10 minutes out of your day to speak to someone new and reflect on your experience. The activities also teach you how to practise mindfulness, how to deal with negative thoughts like worry, guilt and self-doubt, and how to successfully plan and schedule your workload through methods such as post-it planning and WOOP goals.

The modules cover a broad range of issues and obstacles – such as the very common “impostor syndrome”, the (undoubtedly false) perception where you fear that you’ve got to where you are through luck and that you will be “found out” and exposed as a fraud. By teaching you how to cope when self-doubt creeps in; when motivation disappears and procrastination increases, when perfectionism takes hold and when it feels like you’re on your own in the great long battle with your PhD, Postgrad Realities can help you prevent your postgraduate study getting the better of you.

And don’t forget that the Postgrad Community Engagement Team, through our social and cultural events and our  wellbeing events, is here to help make sure that you feel like a part of a postgraduate community and to promote a healthy approach to your postgraduate studies!

What kind of challenges have you been facing to since you started your postgraduate study? Do you often feel overwhelmed or isolated? How have you been tackling these issues? Tweet us at @ResearchEx, email us at libraryblogs@warwick.ac.uk, or leave a comment below.

David Richardson works in the Warwick Library as a Community Engagement Officer. He finished his PhD in 2014, on British pressure groups and movements campaigning on European integration from the 1940s to the 1980s. Outside of work he enjoys music, architecture, photography and bike polo (it’s a real thing – google it!).

Cover image: snail-obstacle-overcoming-will-1447233 / Maryam62 / CC0 1.0

Universities: Increasingly Stressful Environments Taking Psychological Toll – Here's What Needs to Change

by Luca Morini, Coventry University: https://theconversation.com/universities-increasingly-stressful-environments-taking-psychological-toll-heres-what-needs-to-change-97045

shutterstock

Every year, millions of international students travel to different countries to study at university. This, together with a lack of public funding for universities, has created an increasingly competitive market in which universities work directly against each other to chase students and the money they bring.

This shift was heralded by the introduction of a whole host of performance indicators across the global higher education sector – which has become increasingly “gamified” with points and rankings, and winners and losers. And just as universities play against each other for the “top spots” on league tables, students are also taught to compete to be the most “employable”.

For universities the stakes in the game of the higher education market are high. But for students and academics, the stakes of a life transformed into a competitive game can be highly problematic.

More students are dropping out of university because of mental health problems. And the mental health of academics is also suffering more than ever before. One recent survey found that 43% of academic staff exhibited symptoms of at least one mild mental disorder, with increased workloads, and pressures surrounding the job primarily to blame.

Making knowledge production into a game also puts academics in competition with each other, as research is being measured mainly by who publishes first and in the “best” journals – which actually slows the progress and sharing of knowledge.

A game to be won

Framing education (and society) as a zero-sum game can be directly tracked back to the 19th-century pseudoscience of “Social Darwinism” and the eugenics movement. This reflected a view of life as a “gladiatorial struggle”, which has been dominant ever since – even when disproved by science.

Tests and exams help to frame education as a competition to be ‘won’. Shutterstock

So despite all the evidence which shows the importance of working together and cooperation, many people still believe that competition is the most efficient way to organise society.
This has led to the idea that education has to be competitive and only the best will win. And in terms of higher education, the myth of competition is perpetuated by a vision of education not as an element of the common good, but as individual, competitive advantage – a ticket to the top.

The consequences of gaming

Student attainment, as measured by student “outcomes” and graduate employment after university, is now fundamental to university rankings, which in turn influences student recruitment.

To avoid being the “losers” in these games, both students and lecturers are put under an extreme amount of pressure to relentlessly focus on outcomes instead of processes. This in turn impacts on another key factor, student satisfaction, as measured by linear scores in the National Student Survey.

Research has shown that the need to top the scoreboard pushes academics into providing entertainment and services to the “students as customers” instead of challenging them to think critically.

Think about the players

My research in the field of global higher education has shown me how entrenched this global “game” has become. But my research on playful learning has also shown me a possible way out.

Play scholar Bernard DeKoven highlighted two different ways of forming a community around any game: “game community” and “play community”.

The game community is all about winning: the game comes first, it is unchangeable, and decides who is a worthy player and who is cast out. This is what we are seeing now, both in education and in society as a whole. The play community is the opposite. It’s about the involvement of the players. It’s the players who decide if a game is worth playing as it is, or if it would be more inclusive to change it.

Over the next few months I will run a series of workshops, with students, staff and partners all around the world, that will look into “unpacking” the games we play. The hope is that these sessions should help to provide solutions and raise some important questions for the sector, directly from the “players”.

And given that a recent poll of almost 38,000 UK students suggested that rates of psychological distress and illness are on the rise in universities, it is clear the sector desperately needs to reclaim its play community – and create an alternative, cooperative and inclusive “playground” sooner rather than later.

Luca Morini, Research Associate - Education and Media, Coventry University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tips for Finishing a PhD

by Rachel Mc Ardle, Eye on the World:  https://maynoothgeography.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/tips-for-finishing-a-phd/

Image: duckofminerva.com

As I (Rachel Mc Ardle) have recently finished my PhD, I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on some tips which helped me survive the last few months and weeks of my PhD: 

Mental health/ well-being tips:

1. There is light at the end of the tunnel, even when it often feels like there isn’t.
2. You will have to ask for help and get comfortable leaning on other people, it is an incredibly stressful time and the people closest to you will become your support network.
3. As much as you can, take breaks, walks, journal/ brain dump, and look after yourself in terms of time off. If you don’t take breaks your brain simply will not be as productive the next day.
4. Be kind to yourself, allow yourself to feel free to eat whatever food is handy or you want. Prioritise the PhD over other demands and don’t feel guilty about doing this.
5. Know that the important people in your life understand what you’re going through and will understand your inability to go places or do things with them. They will be still there when you finish.

Writing tips:

1. Set up a calendar with specific dates and share it with your supervisor (and maybe a friend or colleague), so that even if you don’t meet the deadline you are still working towards a deadline. Constantly revise (at least once a month). Schedule it as realistically as possible, for example if you have to attend a conference that could take over a week out of that month with attendance, travel and work for the conference.
2. Set up a style sheet on word so that all formatting is the same. Hugely important and can save you time in the end.
3. Create a master checklist of what formatting needs to be done and add to as you progress.
4. A clear schedule of every hour- include breaks!
5. Make a very easy list of what tasks you know are achievable, i.e. read five pages from 9am-10.30am and then when you achieve this, you get a sense of achievement and are motivated for the day.

Sample timetable (that I definitely did not always stick to):

9.00-10.30: read five pages of Chapter 1.

10.30-10.45: coffee, get some air.

10.45-1: read five more pages of Ch 1.

1-2: lunch and walk.

2-3.30: 3 pages of Ch 1 and work on 5 edits.

3.30-4: coffee and break.

4-6: five more pages and check emails.

6-7: exercise/walk/watch TV - whatever you do to relax. Your brain needs downtime before you try and sleep and when I didn’t do this, I couldn’t sleep.

6. Do not check emails until the end of the day and do not check them every day. Your priority has to be your PhD and everything else is secondary in terms of work. There is no email that needs to be answered within 24 hours. Use the FAB method, file it (later), action it (answer now), bin it (not necessary).
7. When you’re too tired to write or really heavily edit, work on smaller tasks such as formatting, quotes or your bibliography.
8. Set up a writing group for Chapter feedback, I found mine super helpful and it meant I was consistently getting feedback from people other than my supervisors.
9. Shut Up and Write sessions are similarly helpful and often a coffee and chat after can help the stress levels.
10. Grammerly and Hemingway are useful tools to check your writing other than word.
11. If you are consistently getting the same feedback about your writing, try focus on that problem and fix it so that you are pre-empting the feedback you may get. If you don’t know what this is, ask your supervisor for advice.
12. Don’t take feedback too personally. Your writing, while it is you doing it, is not a reflection of your value as a person. Your reviewer or supervisor may say something which can seem upsetting or hurtful but they’re just a comment about the words you have chosen, not your work, your ideas or you, so let them just be that. If you find feedback difficult or dread it or it feeds into your anxiety or stress in any way, open the feedback, look at it, then take a break-even a day, and then go back to it and I can promise it will not seem as bad.
13. It just has to be good enough - a perfect thesis is never going to happen. Don’t agonise over perfection, keep editing and submitting to your supervisor as often as possible and don’t hold onto a chapter waiting for it to be perfect, it will never be.
14. Bibliography - use a software tool, such as Zotero, or a more traditional method, but start using it early and do not leave till the last few months. Some references become so obscure and hard to remember and chase-make it easy on yourself and do the best you can!

Finally, you’re about to or are close to completing one of the hardest things you will ever do. I can reassure you that the relief and euphoria you feel on the other side will make it all worth it. Not only that, you learn so much about yourself as a person through this experience. You learn many different things, everyone is different so I won’t give a list. Although your support network and your supervisors are crucial to you completing this work, at the end of it, you do it, so you should be proud and rest assured that you wouldn’t have gotten this far if you couldn’t do it. And remember: “happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light”.

Rachel Mc Ardle. 

Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”)

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/why-incompetent-people-think-theyre-amazing.html

The business world has long had special jargon for the Kafkaesque incompetence bedeviling the ranks of upper management. There is “the Peter principle,” first described in a satirical book of the same name in 1968. More recently, we have the positive notion of “failing upward.” The concept has inspired a mantra, “fail harder, fail faster,” as well as popular books like The Gift of Failure. Famed research professor, author, and TED talker Brené Brown has called TED “the failure conference," and indeed, a “FailCon” does exist, “in over a dozen cities on 6 continents around the globe.”

The candor about this most unavoidable of human phenomena may prove a boon to public health, lowering levels of hypertension by a significant margin. But is there a danger in praising failure too fervently? (Samuel Beckett’s  quote on the matter, beloved by many a 21st century thought leader, proves decidedly more ambiguous in context). Might it present an even greater opportunity for people to “rise to their level of incompetence”? Given the prevalence of the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” a cognitive bias explained by John Cleese in a previous post, we may not be well-placed to know whether our efforts constitute success or failure, or whether we actually have the skills we think we do.

First described by social psychologists David Dunning  (University of Michigan) and Justin Kruger (N.Y.U.) in 1999, the effect “suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately.” So says the narrator of the TED-Ed lesson above, scripted by Dunning and offering a sober reminder of the human propensity for self-delusion. “We frequently overestimate our own abilities,” resulting in widespread “illusory superiority” that makes “incompetent people think they’re amazing.” The effect greatly intensifies at the lower end of the scale; it is often “those with the least ability who are most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent.” Or as Cleese plainly puts it, some people “are so stupid, they have no idea how stupid they are.”

Combine this with the converse effect—the tendency of skilled individuals to underrate themselves—and we have the preconditions for an epidemic of mismatched skill sets and positions. But while impostor syndrome can produce tragic personal results and deprive the world of talent, the Dunning-Kruger effect’s worst casualties affect us all adversely. People “measurably poor at logical reasoning, grammar, financial knowledge, math, emotional intelligence, running medical lab tests, and chess all tend to rate their expertise almost as favorably as actual experts do.” When such people get promoted up the chain, they can unwittingly do a great deal of harm.

While arrogant self-importance plays its role in fostering delusions of expertise, Dunning and Kruger found that most of us are subject to the effect in some area of our lives simply because we lack the skills to understand how bad we are at certain things. We don't know the rules well enough to successfully, creatively break them. Until we have some basic understanding of what constitutes competence in a particular endeavor, we cannot even understand that we’ve failed.

Real experts, on the other hand, tend to assume their skills are ordinary and unremarkable. “The result is that people, whether they’re inept or highly skilled, are often caught in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception." How can we get out? The answers won’t surprise you. Listen to constructive feedback and never stop learning, behavior that can require a good deal of vulnerability and humility.

The PhD: "Revise and Resubmit"

by Pat Thomson, Patter: https://patthomson.net/2019/03/25/revise-and-resubmit/

Yep. Those dreaded words when you get the email back from the journal. R and R. Anything but Rest and Relaxation. Groan. In essence, the message says We have considered your paper and we have decided that – well it’s just not going to cut it. At this point. However, we see enough in it to give you another shot. But only one. And (to steal Ru Paul’s words) Don’t **** it up.

Now the usual advice – and I give it myself – is that when you’re working out what corrections to make it’s helpful to go through the reviewers’ comments and put them in a two column table.  You put what the reviewer said in one column and what you did in the other. As in …

Add more detail to methods	I added four sentences about sampling and two about analysis
Use more literature particularly look at x,y,z	Added xyz to literatures section

Now the make-a-table approach is pretty well always going to work for minor corrections and probably even for the bigger  major corrections. But it might not be enough for an R and R.

The key work in R and R is REVISE – re-vision, re-imagine, re-think. This may well be more than simply adding in a few sentences here or there or a new section. An R and R not always going to be a ‘tinkering around’ leaving most of the paper intact. Just adding and deleting a few things is a correction, not a re-imagining. In fact, most of the time, when reviewers recommend R and R they are looking for some pretty big changes. Gah – it’s likely to be a pretty substantial  re-write.

It’s tough to front up to a paper and try to rethink it. To start again. To try to work out how it might be different. That’s because we get attached to our words. We may even like the paper that we wrote and find it pretty galling that the reviewers didn’t. We may want to try to get away with the least possible number of corrections. We may seriously not want to even consider the possibility that what we are being asked to do is a lot of extra hard work. That’s natural. But that is what we are being asked to consider.

And here a pause. Just to say that I speak here from experience. And lots of it. In just the last twelve months, my colleagues and I have had two R and Rs. Other papers went through with minor changes, but, yes, we had two papers where we were told R and R. It happens to all of us.

Our problems weren’t to do with the actual writing of the paper but what we were writing about. The reviewers of the particular journals just didn’t find the arguments we were making particularly interesting or persuasive. Now, it wasn’t all bad. Writing the papers had been very useful for our research project – they really helped to advance our analysis. But they just weren’t suited to the journals we wanted to publish in.

So, when faced with the two the R and Rs, we had choices – take the papers as they were to other journals, give up on the papers altogether, or try to do enough tweaks to get past the reviewers. Or – we could rethink the papers. Yes, rethink. Go back to the beginning and start over.

In both cases, that’s what we did. We went back to the beginning.

One paper didn’t require as much rethinking as the other. Paper A reviewers suggested some new literatures for us to read. We read them and then constructed a somewhat different argument – more nuanced perhaps than the one we had originally submitted. The title of the paper stayed the same, but there was a new abstract, a new theoretical discussion which incorporated the new literatures, a new thread of analysis and a new conclusion.

The second paper, paper B, had a much more dramatic change. The reviewers didn’t seem to get our argument and found the topic and our empirical work not particularly interesting. They seemed to say that our theorisation was pretty incomprehensible.Or light weight. One or the other.  But potentially interesting. So we switched the focus of the paper and it became about the theoretical development since that was what seemed to be of interest as well as at issue. We used our empirical material – which we love – to show how the theoretical work might be done.  The paper ended up with a new title, abstract and argument. It was almost entirely rewritten with only the methods section and some of the empirical reporting carried over.

While we might be able to explain the changes made to paper A through a table, paper B wouldn’t fit in a table at all. The changes were holistic. We had taken a cue from the reviewers’ comments and re-imagined and re-designed the lot. Holus-bolus. It was a new paper born from the remains of the first one.

I guess you want to know if the papers got published once the R and Rs were done. Yes. Both are now in print. But neither of them would be if we hadn’t been prepared to just go with where the rethinking took us. If we weren’t ready to make whatever changes followed on from the new literatures (paper A) or whatever resulted from trying to explain our theoretical development in sufficient detail for it to be understood. We were ready and able in both cases for a complete and comprehensive overhaul. And Paper B was just this – a complete and total reworking.

There’s a clear and obvious moral to this story. And it’s that R and R may mean more than a few additions and deletions. It often requires you to have the courage to say – wrong journal – or the courage to say Oh. I need to put the first version to one side and try to understand the reviewers’ overall message, not just the individual points they are making along the way. I just have to suck it up.

So some questions to help in this R and R revisioning process – What am I being told about the paper, what’s the reviewers’ story about my paper, where do the reviewers actually think the problem is?  The structure of the paper? The argument isn’t evidenced? If I had read some different literatures I’d potentially change my argument? The theory doesn’t fit or isn’t well developed? The paper doesn’t fit with the interests of the journal and I need to shift focus if I want to be published here?

These kinds of questions orient you to consider the paper in its entirety. Take a helicopter view. See the paper in the landscape of the journal and its readers. Adopt an evaluative stance to your own work.

But ultimately R and R is a question of having the will to chuck the paper up in the air and see where it lands.  And this might be a case of singing to yourself …

There once was a writer called Dr Finnegan

Wrote a paper they thought’d get in again

Got an R and R back and had to bin again

Poor old Dr Finnegan. … Begin again.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

24 Common Cognitive Biases: A Visual List of the Psychological Systems Errors That Keep Us From Thinking Rationally

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/24-common-cognitive-biases.html

There’s been a lot of talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias that makes people wildly overconfident, unable to know how ignorant they are because they don’t have the basic skills to grasp what competence means. Once popularized, the effect became weaponized. People made armchair diagnoses, gloated and pointed at the obliviously stupid. But if those finger-pointers could take the beam out of their own eye, they might see four fingers pointing back at them, or whatever folk wisdom to this effect you care to mash up.

What we now call cognitive biases have been known by many other names over the course of millennia. Perhaps never have the many varieties of self-deception been so specific. Wikipedia lists 185 cognitive biases, 185 different ways of being irrational and deluded. Surely, it’s possible that every single time we—maybe accurately—point out someone else’s delusions, we’re hoarding a collection of our own. According to much of the research by psychologists and behavioral economists, this may be inevitable and almost impossible to remedy.

Want to better understand your own cognitive biases and maybe try to move beyond them if you can? See a list of 24 common cognitive biases in an infographic poster at yourbias.is, the site of the nonprofit School of Thought (the two gentlemen popping up behind brainy Jehovah in the poster, notes Visual Capitalist, "happen to represent Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two of the leading social scientists known for their contributions to this field. Not only did they pioneer work around cognitive biases starting in the late 1960s, but their partnership also resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002").

Granted, a Wikipedia list is a crowd-sourced creation with lots of redundancy and quite a few “dubious or trivial” entries, writes Ben Yagoda at The Atlantic. “The IKEA effect, for instance, is defined as ‘the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects they partially assembled themselves.’” Much of the value I’ve personally placed on IKEA furniture has to do with never wanting to assemble IKEA furniture again. “But a solid group of 100 or so biases has been repeatedly shown to exist, and can make a hash of our lives.”

These are the tricks of the mind that keep gamblers gambling, even when they’re losing everything. They include not only the “gambler’s fallacy” but confirmation bias and the fallacy of sunk cost, the tendency to pursue a bad outcome because you’ve already made a significant investment and you don’t want it to have been for nothing. It may seem ironic that the study of cognitive biases developed primarily in the field of economics, the only social science, perhaps, that still assumes humans are autonomous individuals who freely make rational choices.

But then, economists must constantly contend with the counter-evidence—rationality is not a thing most humans do well (evolutionarily speaking, this may have been no great disadvantage until we got our hands on weapons of mass destruction and the tools of climate collapse). When we act rationally in some areas, we tend to fool ourselves in others. Is it possible to overcome bias? That depends on what we mean. Political and personal prejudices—against ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities—are usually buttressed by the systems errors known as cognitive biases, but they are not caused by them. They are learned ideas that can be unlearned.

What researchers and academics mean when they talk about bias does not relate to specific content of beliefs, but rather to the ways in which our minds warp logic to serve some psychological or emotional need or to help regulate and stabilize our perceptions in a manageable way. “Some of these biases are related to memory,” writes Kendra Cherry at Very Well Mind, others “might be related to problems with attention. Since attention is a limited resource, people have to be selective about what they pay attention to in the world around them.”

We’re constantly missing what’s right in front of us, in other words, because we’re trying to pay attention to other people too. It’s exhausting, which might be why we need eight hours or so of sleep each night if we want our brains to function half decently. Go to yourbias.is for this list of 24 common cognitive biases, also available on a nifty poster you can order and hang on the wall. You'll also find there an illustrated collection of logical fallacies and a set of “critical thinking cards” featuring both kinds of reasoning errors. Once you've identified and defeated all your own cognitive biases—all 24, or 100, or 185 or so—then you'll be ready to set out and fix everyone else's.

via Visual Capitalist