Fighting The Saboteur in Your Relationships: Dealing with Cognitive Biases
Channel: Arthur Doler
Date: 2024-01-26

This was a talk I gave at Nebraska.Code in July of 2023. This talk is a fun one to give, since it's all over the place.

The abstract for the talk: 
Modern software requires the efforts of a coordinated, dedicated team of individuals. We need to work with other people, and in order to do that, we have to maintain relationships with them. But no matter how polite, conscientious, or amiable you are, there’s still something that’s always working against you - your own brain, and its host of cognitive biases. For the last several years, books and podcasts and presentations have warned of the danger of cognitive biases, but we just haven’t had the ammunition to fight against them effectively… until now.

A new wave of cutting-edge psychological research is showing us how to fight back against our cognitive biases, and you can make use of it! You’ll learn how to diminish attribution errors, how to grapple with tribalism, and how to jump the empathy gap. Find out how to knock illusory superiority down to size, and how to extinguish the halo effect. And the best part is that the only piece of hardware you’ll need to do it is the thing you already have between your ears - your own brain.