#cognitivebias — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cognitivebias, aggregated by home.social.
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What if AI isn’t making you smarter — just **better at being wrong?**
AI can turn assumptions into convincing arguments and polished analysis.
The key distinction: **AI-assisted reasoning vs AI-assisted rationalization.**
Instead of asking:
“Can you prove I’m right?”
Ask:
**“Can you help me discover that I’m wrong?”**
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From the Leanpub Blog: Leanpub Book LAUNCH 🚀 Contemplation: The Interior Forms of Epistemic Failure by James Roy Dennis
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #epistemicFailure #selfKnowledge #epistemology #cognitiveBias #carryFailure
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NEW! Leanpub Book LAUNCH 🚀 Contemplation: The Interior Forms of Epistemic Failure by James Roy Dennis
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #epistemicFailure #selfKnowledge #epistemology #cognitiveBias #carryFailure
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DATE: August 12, 2026 at 11:45PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEEDTITLE: Why your brain keeps making the same decisions – even when better options exist
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260812015218.htm
Why do we keep making the same choices even when better options are available? Researchers found that simply repeating a decision can reshape what we prefer, causing familiar choices to feel better than alternatives. Instead of weighing every option from scratch, the brain often remembers what it chose before and repeats it. That shortcut may help explain many everyday habits and seemingly irrational decisions.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260812015218.htm
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #DecisionMaking #BrainShortcuts #HabitFormation #BehavioralScience #CognitiveBias #DecisionFatigue #PreferenceShift #Neuroscience #RationalVsIrrational #ChoiceArchitecture
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**One problem. One enemy. One solution.**
Simple narratives are comforting. Complexity isn't.
What if our preference for simple answers isn't stupidity, but an evolutionary strategy — one increasingly unsuited to the complex world we've created?
My latest on *Wrong Opinions*: **The Price of Complexity**
https://wrongopinions.com/ideas-and-society/the-price-of-complexity/
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DATE: August 3, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Body dysmorphia is linked to an exaggerated cognitive bias for self-related information
People with body dysmorphic tendencies learn and process self-related information more strongly than information about other people, according to new research. This exaggerated focus on the self extends even to neutral, everyday objects that have nothing to do with physical appearance. The findings, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, provide evidence that a basic bias in how the brain processes self-relevant information might contribute to severe body image preoccupations.
Body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, is a mental health condition characterized by an intense and distressing preoccupation with perceived flaws in physical appearance. Individuals with BDD often spend hours each day focusing on minor or imagined physical anomalies. This behavior tends to severely disrupt their daily lives, relationships, and social functioning.
“We were motivated to understand what underlying information-processing mechanisms may be contributing to the observed symptomatology of body dysmorphic disorder,” said Maria Richards-Brown, a researcher in the Department of Psychosis Studies at King’s College London. “Through understanding where information processing may differ as one exhibits more body dysmorphic symptoms, we can hopefully identify clinical treatment targets.”
To understand how this intense preoccupation develops, psychologists look at how the brain manages and assigns importance to different types of information. In the general population, people naturally display a “self-prioritization effect.”
“In the general population, individuals show a greater prioritization of processing information about themselves, compared to information about their best friend or a stranger,” Richards-Brown explained. “This is a well-known information processing bias.”
This psychological concept suggests that individuals process, learn, and recall information associated with themselves much faster and more accurately than information associated with other people. For example, if a person is asked to associate a random object with themselves and another object with a stranger, they will consistently recognize the self-associated object with greater ease.
Previous models suggest that BDD might emerge from a hyperactive self-attention network in the brain. This heightened internal focus could cause a person to pay excessive attention to self-related cues, magnifying normal bodily signals into intense preoccupations.
The authors of the current paper designed their research to test whether people with higher levels of body dysmorphic symptoms show an inflated version of this standard self-prioritization effect. They wanted to determine if this bias exists even when the information being processed has no connection to physical appearance.
In the first experiment, the scientists recruited 87 female participants through an online platform. The participants ranged in age from 32 to 71 years old. They completed a standard questionnaire used to screen for the presence and severity of BDD symptoms.
Next, participants completed an associative learning task. The researchers asked them to learn specific pairings between three geometric shapes (a triangle, a circle, and a square) and three personal labels (“You,” the first name of their best friend, and “Stranger”). After a brief learning period, the participants viewed a series of shape and label combinations on a screen.
For each trial, participants had a brief window to press a specific keyboard key to indicate whether the pairing on the screen matched the original associations they had learned, or if it was a mismatch. For instance, if they originally learned that a square represented “You,” they might later see a square paired with the word “Stranger,” which would be an incorrect mismatch.
Across the board, participants demonstrated the standard self-prioritization effect. They were more accurate and faster at correctly identifying matches involving the “You” label compared to the “Friend” or “Stranger” labels.
When factoring in the questionnaire scores, the authors found a specific pattern related to body image concerns. Participants with higher BDD symptom scores were more accurate at identifying the self-related pairings compared to the stranger-related pairings. This gap in accuracy between the self and the stranger was wider for those with higher body dysmorphic tendencies than for those with lower scores.
To confirm and expand upon these initial observations, the scientists conducted a second experiment with a new sample. This group included 173 participants, consisting of 135 females and 41 males ranging from 19 to 71 years old. The procedures were largely the same, but the researchers made the matching task slightly more difficult by flashing the shape-label pairings on the screen for a much shorter duration of 250 milliseconds.
In this second experiment, the researchers also administered two additional questionnaires. One measured symptoms of depression, and the other measured general impulsivity. They included these extra measures to control for the possibility that depression or impulsivity might account for any differences in learning speed or accuracy, rather than BDD symptoms.
The second experiment confirmed the exaggerated self-prioritization effect in individuals with higher body dysmorphic scores. In this iteration, participants with elevated BDD symptoms showed greater accuracy in identifying “You” matches compared to “Friend” matches. The reaction time data also revealed a tailored self-bias.
Participants with more BDD symptoms were disproportionately faster at identifying self-related pairings compared to both friend- and stranger-related pairings. The additional questionnaires provided helpful context for these outcomes. The researchers found that the influence of depression and impulsivity on these processing biases was not statistically significant.
These results point to a core cognitive difference in how people with these preoccupations view the world. “In individuals that have more body dysmorphic symptoms, this bias is even greater, indicating that there is an information processing bias underlying the symptomatic presentations of BDD,” Richards-Brown said.
Relying on an online sample from the general population introduces certain constraints. The participants completed a screening questionnaire that measures body dysmorphic tendencies, but they were not formally diagnosed with BDD by a clinician. Applying these findings directly to clinical settings requires testing patients who have received a formal psychiatric diagnosis.
The study also relied on an uneven ratio of male to female participants, primarily due to sampling constraints in the first experiment. Although the available data did not show sex differences in how people processed self-related information, recruiting a more balanced sample in the future would help confirm that these cognitive patterns operate similarly across all demographics.
Future research might explore how these cognitive biases change during therapeutic interventions. Tracking whether the exaggerated self-prioritization effect diminishes as BDD symptoms improve could offer a new way to measure treatment progress. Adapting these simple computer tasks into training exercises might also help individuals practice directing their attention away from the self, offering a potential supplemental treatment for body image distress.
The study, “Exaggerated Self-Referencing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder,” was authored by M. Richards-Brown, S. Castiello de Obeso, R. Dennison, and R. A. Murphy.
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyDysmorphia #SelfPrioritization #BDDSymptoms #SelfReferencing #CognitiveBias #MentalHealthResearch #BodyImageDisturbance #SelfProcessing #PsychologyStudy #BDDTreatmentPotential
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Emotional intensity is not evidence for a belief's accuracy. A triggering event activates an automatic thought, which generates an emotional consequence. We often accept the consequence as proof of the belief. The active phase of Disputation collects evidence for and against the belief.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/cognitive-restructuring-guide/
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Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-illusion-of-explanatory-depth
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079175
#HackerNews #understanding #bias #cognitivebias #explanatorydepth #illusionofunderstanding #criticalthinking
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I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI
https://louwrentius.com/i-think-you-might-be-fooling-yourself-with-ai.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021843
#HackerNews #AI #self-awareness #AIethics #techinsights #cognitivebias
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Ministry Proposes Tax on Nostalgia Posts to Save the Environment
The Ministry has proposed a Nostalgia Tax on every "Only 90s kids will understand..." post. The revenue will help data centers survive the endless storage of recycled memories while an official investigation examines whether the good old days were actually good—or just remembered that way. -
"Quantifiable risk belongs to the casino, the mortality table, and the actuarial ledger. It describes a world where the outcome of an event is unknown, but historical data exists to support a probability estimate. Because the boundaries of the system are fixed, we can use historical data to calculate numerical odds.
Knightian uncertainty, by contrast, considers the unprecedented. It arises when a situation, like climate change, is so novel or complex that history offers no guide. We are pushing the biosphere far outside its Holocene baseline, entering an environment where the variables themselves are changing, and the models used to project future outcomes break down."
Why We're Blind to Civilizational Collapse
by Sarah Connor
July 8th, 2026https://collapse2050.substack.com/p/why-were-blind-to-civilizational
#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #CollapseAware #polycrisis #DisasterPreparedness #CognitiveBias #LogicalFallacy #SelectiveUpdating #Sociology #HumanPsychology
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Ah, the classic saga of engineers wrestling with their own cognitive inadequacies 🤯. This riveting manifesto reveals the shocking truth that the human brain isn't as mighty as the software it spawns 😱. So grab your glossary and start planning to triage your bounded cognition, because apparently, that's the shape of the system! 🧠💾
https://shapeofthesystem.com/posts/2026/02/03/bounded-cognition #cognitivebias #engineering #mindset #softwaredevelopment #brainpower #mentalhealth #HackerNews #ngated -
When technical defenses improve, attackers don't retreat. They shift investment to the unprotected layer: the human mind.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/cognitive-security-mental-immunity/
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The Second Thinking Space
This article explains why I use artificial intelligence not as a substitute for thinking, but as a second thinking space. Based on the idea that complex structures are rarely understood from within a single perspective, AI serves as a means of exploration, pattern recognition, intellectual challenge, and perspective expansion. The goal is not automation, but deeper insight into the hidden structures that shape decisions, organisations, and human behaviour.https://ifabsthill.com/2026/06/19/the-second-thinking-space/
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Intelligence does not create immunity to misinformation. It sometimes changes the packaging. The brain's dual architecture means fast, intuitive judgments operate continuously, while slow analysis is effortful and depletes. Exploitation targets the asymmetry, not the intellect.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/cognitive-biases-brain-hardwired-believe-lies/
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A source that controls its own narrative controls nothing. The asymmetry is simple: misinformation builds About pages, author bios, and citations. It does not build independent verification. Fact-checkers leave the page and search the source name across external sites.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/lateral-reading-fact-checkers-guide/