Being biased is a natural concept; in nature one needs to decide fast if one is safe or in danger and need to run away. The act of judging on preliminary, incomplete or assumed information is part of our genes.
Bias is often the hardest issue to tackle in technical discussions; being it a 5 line algorithm or a complete distributed architecture. So let's focus on the most frequent ones:
- Anchoring, which means to rely on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions.
- Apophenia, the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data.
- Confirmation bias, which is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's beliefs.
- First Solution bias. Tendency to favor the first solution.
- Normalcy bias.
During the session, we describe the 5 biases, discuss the impact they have on design and give tips on how to detect and prevent them from happening.