Hello all, and welcome to another To Debonder with Dr.

Greg McVary.

Today I want to talk a little bit about cognitive bias and how that interacts with the study of technology and education.

The fundamental idea of a cognitive bias is that reality is a construction and not so much the result of objective inputs.

Your mind, your state of being, prior knowledge, all of that gets in the way of what your ears and eyes take in.

And we come at this issue from multiple theoretical perspectives.

First, it’s this idea that we are irrational beings living in a bounded rationality, meaning there are certain elements that require us to have a cognitive bias for us to be able to survive and thrive in a boundless society, so we construct these boundaries of rationality, and that in turn, as a side effect, creates cognitive bias.

Then you have this whole idea that we are embodied agents in these systems.

Having a bad day can impact your bias.

Being a part of the in-crowd or wanting to be a part of the in-crowd can impact your bias.

And then finally, from the information processing idea, is this concept that we have a limited capacity to process information, and so that limited capacity leads to us filling in the holes through bias.

And there are different kinds that get categorized, such as confirmation bias, affinity bias, the halo effect.

And so we have to wonder, is it really just irrationality is a rational ecological development?

It’s a question.