 Yeah, as you heard, my name is Victoria. I'm a PhD student in neurobiology here in Munich. And even though my topic is not cognitive neuroscience, but actually Alzheimer's disease on mice, I want to talk today about cognitive biases. Because from my personal experience, I know this topic is something not just interesting, but also very useful in everyday life. That's why I want to give you a hint what cognitive biases are. And hopefully by the end of the talk, you are inspired to learn more about them. I also see if you experience these cognitive biases in your own life. Wikipedia tells us, so cognitive bias is a pattern of irrational behavior in the situations when we need to make a judgment or we need to make a decision. I think this is very descriptive, but not very easy to grasp what it is. So I wanted to give you first an example that you can easily see what the cognitive bias is. Let's imagine the experiment. So you are a volunteer in the experiment. And you are presented with two pictures, either to female or to male pictures. And then you have to choose which one you find more attractive. So you choose one, and then you are given this picture and you have to describe why you think this is more attractive. So why did you make this decision? It's quite an easy task, right? So I think everyone can do that. But imagine what will happen if you actually given the wrong card. So you say, I want to have this card, but then you get the other one. Who of you think that you will immediately realize this is the wrong card? Raise your hand. Okay, some people think it's easier, right? That's like, it's obvious you see it's the wrong card. Okay, let's check what happens in reality. 80% of the people we tested had absolutely no idea that a switch had been made. Again, this one just struck me. Interesting shot. Since I'm a photographer, I like the way it's lit and looks. So you see apparently 80% of people don't realize that they were given a wrong card and they experienced two cognitive biases by this. First, they have a false memory. So they think they actually did select this card that they were given, which never happened. And then they post-rationalized and they come up with the explanation. Why did they do this decision? Even though apparently there were no really rational reasons because if they were rational reasons to choose the other card, they probably would realize that they were given the wrong card. So these are two examples of cognitive biases. We do something very rational but we don't realize that. And if you now feel that cognitive bias is probably something which happens with people in the lab because you're stressed by the scientists, they're giving you some weird tasks, this is not the case. Actually this happens in many different environments. And one of the cognitive biases which is called Curse of Knowledge is something which we see a lot when we prepare the talks for 15 by four. Our speakers are experts or at least very big fans of the topic they want to talk about. So they know a lot. And when they try to explain their knowledge, they start with a very high level. And for them it's really hard to see that the audience will have a very different background. So this Curse of Knowledge really prevents them from making good talks. This is why we do three rehearsals for each of the talk to help the speakers get rid of these cognitive bias and be better. And I think you all had some kind of experience with the Curse of Knowledge even if you did not need to give a talk, you probably tried at some point to teach someone something new and realized that the person just doesn't get it even though you explained it in simple words. And the problem was probably that the person did not have the same background as you had in this. And then you had to go back and explain all the background and only then it became efficient. So this is another example of the cognitive bias. Why do the cognitive bias happen at all? Why do they appear in our life? It's because our brain is not a super precise computer and it's not also very fast in calculations. While our life often requires us to act very fast, we need to make decisions fast and we don't have enough time to make rational decisions. At the same time, there is information overload. So we always bombard it with a lot of different information. We already don't have time to think about it. And then we also have to select which information is important and which is less important. And then what is worse? We often still lack details. So we have a lot of information but for many cases, we don't have a full picture of the situation. So we need to make a decision but we don't know all the details. What do we do? So our brains try to find a way around. So it tries to find a proxy by which it can make a decision fast with lacking information and also in situation where there's too much information that has to be filtered. Let's look at one of the examples more close. Imagine there is not enough information. So you get some information but not enough to make a very rational decision. So what the brain will do then? One of the cases or one of the proxies that the brain has is to find a pattern in a sparse data. And this is actually why the superstitions appear. This is why some people think, okay, if I catch the bus early when I go out to work, then the day will be great. Or if I meet a black cat, actually then the day will be super bad. While not the bus, not the cat, has nothing to do with whatever happens afterwards with your day. Still, our brain tries to find some patterns because then it's easier to make decisions and easier to behave afterwards. And even though we are having some problems with the projector that's not the big problem for me, I still can see the slides here. Yeah, thanks. So I will go on in any case because the next thing I wanted to talk to you is a more specific example of the situation when our brain doesn't have enough details and then tries to look for them. And the situation is that then we try to generalize things. So we try to find some rules which are common to all the situations and then we can apply them. And the specific case when we do that is called survivorship bias. This is also kind of cognitive bias that we use a lot, but then can also lead us to wrong decisions. And the vivid example of this cognitive bias is the situation which happened during the Second World War in the US Army. US Army wanted to have a better aircraft so they wanted to reinforce the aircraft with some way that will prevent damage and then that more aircraft will survive and now more people also will survive. So what they did, they looked at all the aircrafts that came back to the base and they look okay where we have the most damage and then they put all the spots in the places where the most damage was made. And then the military people thought okay, so we should put more armor in these places and then the aircraft will be more stable. It sounds reasonable, right? Do you think it sounds reasonable? No. I see some people are already guessing there is a trick around. Actually this was a very wrong decision and the good, they didn't make it. And luckily they had a big group of statisticians working for US Army to help them exactly with the difficult situations like that. And one of the statisticians, Abraham Wald, told them, okay guys, actually you are looking not on the full data, you just look at those aircrafts that survived, but those which did not survive, they will provide us with most valuable information because they got the damage that was lethal so they couldn't come back, they crashed. And for example, if the plane was hit in the tail, it would never come back to the base. So this is the place where we should put more armor. The places where are not damaged in the aircraft survived, we should put more armor. And this is a typical example of survivorship bias. This is what the military experienced. They just looked at those who'd survived the situation and never considered the others. And this is what we often do also in everyday life. We look at the people who are very successful because we also want to be successful in something and we try to look for some success secret. But in fact, we just look at the people who were survivors of the specific situation. And we never look at those who did not make it through. And these people may have had very similar education, had great parents, had a lot of good stuff and made some great decisions and they also were dedicated and they had a big dream, but they still didn't make it through. And if we don't look at those, we don't get a full picture because actually those who did not survive can give us a hint what were the crucial mistakes that you should never do. Or also we can learn from them that sometimes it's not just about what you do but also about luck. And here you should not over generalize as well. So I'm not saying that luck is the only thing for success, right? They're always a combination, but you need both luck and also dedication and hard work. So this is something to have in your head when you read all these success stories in magazines. We now went through several cognitive biases just to remind you, we talked about false memories. You remember the guys that remember they picked the card which they actually never picked and this is just an example of the false memory. We saw that fast non-rational decisions are prompted by our environment, by our life and often this can be wrong decisions or just at least non-rational decisions. Like again with a card, the person has to pick the card very fast and didn't have time to make rational decision. We have experienced the curse of knowledge. I told you example of 15 by four. This is what we have here often but also maybe in your own life you had experienced that we are looking for patterns and sparse data and this is why we have superstitions or why gamblers also come up with certain rules in which they believe that will help them win. And we talked about the survivorship bias and specific example of the airplanes but as you see it also applies to many other areas of our lives. So it looks kind of scary, right? There are a lot of bad things that happen to us. There are a lot of cognitive biases and how can we live with that? I don't know maybe next each time we should sit with a piece of paper write down everything, make a very rational decision. Do you think this is the way to go? No, okay. Yeah, I also think this is not really necessary. So it's important to remember sometimes we don't need the best decision. We just need to make a decision fast enough and it should be good enough that we can go on. For example, you go to a supermarket to buy butter. You don't want to look at all the packages of different brands of butter and decide which one is precisely the best one, right? This is not so important. You just pick one, go one, you have more important stuff to do. This is why it's also okay to sometimes be led by cognitive biases and let your brain decide for you. However, in other cases, for example, probably presidential election, you want to be very rational about what you do like and use your logic. So sometimes it's also good to sit down, think what are the arguments, pro and cons, what is the opposite point of view to the situation and make a more rational decision in this case. And with this, I would like to leave you with this maybe scary but also very interesting list of different cognitive biases you can experience. I encourage you very much to investigate more on this topic. You can find this picture if you type in cognitive bias codecs in your Google or you just go cognitive bias Wikipedia and you get a long list. You can just randomly read some of the articles and you will already learn a lot. I think this is a topic which will really enrich your life in case you use it with rationality. You can be rational, it's good to be rational, but not every time. Thank you very much. Ah. Well, thank you, Victoria. So we have time for some questions. Someone, please. Yeah, I'm a little bit confused about the concept of cognitive bias because it seems like it's a little bit broad for me, but I want to pose one question here. It's like, what do you mean by a rational decision somehow? Because you are all the time talking about irrational and rational, but we know that rational decisions also are irrational. So in that concept, I want you to point out what do you mean about making a rational decision because we know that the cognitive bias actually is pushing you to make that decision. So the question is how you define a rational decision and how the cognitive bias can intervene, is this? Yes, okay. Of course, there are cases where rational decision is just not possible because, for example, we cannot predict the future and we don't know which of the decisions will lead to the better future. But in some cases, there is a clear difference between rational decision and non-rational, like more logical and less logical. For example, you get more money and you get less money. Or sales lead to you buying more stuff. Actually, you lose a lot of money. You're not saving the money because you would just buy more stuff than you should. And this is clearly a non-rational decision, even though we feel this is something we want to do. For any of us against all the news theories about how we make decisions is actually, and there is a lot of studies that says that you are just speaking something that is irrational at the beginning, but then you are aware that you took the decision so you think it's rational, but it's not. So the continuation of the question is, what about the news studies on a rational decision, Nobel Prize, for example? Yeah, honestly speaking, I don't see the contradiction to what I said. I think this is partially a question of definitions. But the rational decision here is meant, the decision which actually is more logical for anyone, like absolute. The other question is we often make irrational decisions and then we post-trationalize. This is what I also told you, and this is cognitive bias, and they exist. I'm not saying anyone is clearly rational. This is, of course, also not true. There isn't, but you need to continue with discussion after the event. So please. Do you see the conditions where we might see with autonomous driving and decision making this risk of cognitive bias in the programming of the vehicles and the protocols of how they deal with traffic situations? And somebody says, I'd like some kind of software that says, I'll be a little bit quicker on a red light, it's going to green. Is there an issue that the programmer's cognitive bias would actually appear in how the autonomous vehicles from different companies would behave in the same traffic situation? So the question is if concept of cognitive biases also applicable for the artificial intelligence system, essentially. For example, autonomous driving. I have to first excuse myself. I'm not expert in the topic of autonomous driving. So if anyone is a better expert, maybe you can talk later. I guess this is not going to happen because normally when we program things, we apply quite a rational logic. So it's not so easy to irrationally program from my imagination, but I have to say I'm a biologist. So maybe I have a very wrong understanding of programming. Maybe your neighbor can actually tell you better. Sorry for putting you in this situation, but probably you know better. We have time for one more question, please. I have a question, but a comment says, if you program a system, probably you can remove devices, but most of artificial intelligence systems are based on data. And if the data has a bias, then it will automatically be gone. And there are many systems which you show, for example, spatial recognition systems. They recognize white people more easily than black people. And this is based on data, and this is a program. So the commentary was essentially what the cognitive bias of artificial intelligence is a cognitive bias of the data on which you train the model. So I know some stuff about this particular topic. Yeah, OK, good. Do you want to answer the question? No, no, no. I'm a writer here, sorry. But I think then again the question of definition comes because normally we say cognitive to something which applies to human intelligence. And I'm not sure if it's fully accepted yet that artificial intelligence also have the cognitive things happening, like can it have the cognitive bias? It can have a bias. Will it be cognitive? I think this is an open question. Sorry, we will go for one more question, please. I have a simple question. When you recognize a cognitive bias, even if you do come to the conclusion that you're actually being biased towards something, can you actually overcome it? Because more often than not, we actually try to confirm our rational decisions if it's even rational. The question is if you feel or can understand what you have cognitive bias, can you overcome this in yourself? I think you can. But situations might be different. So I also was interested in this topic because I felt myself that it helps me to make better decisions in cases when it's really important. So in case when it's really important, when I'm about to make a very important decision, I really take a step back. I don't follow my first intuition, like to think, OK, I had some experience and I think it should be always like that. I really try to explore other options. If I'm strongly against something, I try to find out what are the opinions of other people who are pro something and what are the arguments and then logically wait. So I think it is doable. Depends on how much time you have probably. You can continue on the out of the event. This is very interesting topic. Thank you, Victoria.