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Cognitive Biases 101, with Peter Baumann | Big Think

Big Think | December 31, 2025



Cognitive Biases 101, with Peter Baumann
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How much does cognitive bias change people’s perception? Well, the history of computing would be a lot different. And so would many major orchestras, who had to implement a curtain during auditions so that judges and orchestral directors could only judge musicians on their skills… and not their gender. Michael Li, PhD, is the founder of The Data Incubator, an education startup training STEM PhDs to be data scientists and quants.
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MICHAEL LI:

Michael Li, PhD, is the founder of The Data Incubator, an education startup training STEM PhDs to be data scientists and quants. He has worked at Foursquare, Google, A16Z, NASA, JPMorgan, and D.E. Shaw. He is a Hertz, NSF, and Marshall Scholar and is an alumnus of Princeton and Cambridge. Michael founded a student-run conference in quant trading that features leading industry figures and raises money for educational non-profits like America Needs You.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Li: A sort of interesting fact is that, while today programming is viewed as an extremely male-dominated field, it was totally the opposite at the dawn of computing.

So if you look at who the original programmers were, they were actually women! All programmers from the very beginning were women and it was because this job was seen as being “beneath” men. And so somehow in the interceding 30, 40, 50 years, that gender of dynamics has completely shifted around.

But what we’re seeing now is that sometimes it’s the implicit biases that we have which are holding back women and minorities from entering the workforce, either as data scientists or as computer engineers and software engineers.

And we’ve seen a lot of research in this area that’s shown that there can be some implicit biases in how we judge people once we know their name, their gender or their race.

And what we do when we assess the people who are going to be working for us is we are completely blind to these things.

We actually strip away the name when we consider people’s applications. We just look at how they perform on a series of challenges that we give them that really try to test their ability to be data scientists and test their understanding of these kind of core fundamental mathematical programming concepts.

And when we do that I think it actually becomes a much more fair process and it actually can help increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities who sort of make it through the screening process.

Just to give you one sort of quick anecdote about this there’s a famous story about music auditions in the 1970s where orchestras had a very, very tiny percentage of their members or their players there – the people who were playing in the orchestra as women.

And what happened is at some point they decided to try to break free from this and they would put down a curtain between the performer, that is the auditioner, and the judging panel that was trying to determine whether she or he should be allowed to play in the orchestra. And when they did the results were night and day.

There’s a famous study that’s up on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website published by two famous researchers from Harvard talking about this.

It’s called “orchestrating diversity” and it talks about how the results were a night and day difference: the fraction for women who made it past the screening round shot up something like sevenfold between not having the curtain down and having the curtain down.

And it just goes to sort of show that at this time there was an implicit bias that women weren’t really the kind of caliber of musician that you needed to be able to perform at Carnegie Hall, right? At these kind of top level symphonic performance.

And when you put down a curtain and you just listened to them as opposed to being able to see whether they were a man or a woman, you then—without that kind of knowledge you suddenly were forced to make judgments just based on the music, just based on their ability and you saw that you were much more willing to let in women than before.

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Comments

This post currently has 41 comments.

  4. @ricksantkuyl3054

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    He says that bias is ok – I disagree. Bias results in incorrect interpretations of what's going on. It results in delusions (a disconnect with reality). And you can't win a battle with mother nature, you can only work with her and our problem solving ability is limited by how well we understand how the world works. I'd suggest that bias (delusions) are a key cause of the political polarization we have.

  6. @Totumfacky

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    I wonder what confirmation bias is in Poland. When I heard that in Germany that bias is "don't make a mistake, get everything right" it makes me a connotation that Germany is so neat country with a lot the things fixed that in Poland the same things are broken. Sometimes I think Polish confirmation bias is "don't do this – what others will tell, what your neighbour will tell, what your grandmother will tell?" – could be confirmation bias damaging? Like abstaining from acting and turning negative against other?

  13. @erlineandrews

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    I don't agree with his examples of bias. Biases are irrational. That's what makes them bad! Preferring to be on stable ground rather than wobbling ground is not a bias. On wobbling ground you're more likely to fall down and hurt yourself. Preferring to be alive rather than dead is not a bias!

  16. @UponGiantsShoulders

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    On Uniqueness "bias".

    Complexity and uniqueness tend go hand in hand. Naturally certain questions arise when discussing the definitive features of a person. What defines a person? How specific do we get; what is the resolution of inquiry?

    If you imagine experience is fundamental, and that all aspects of a person are derived from experience then it becomes even harder to imagine sameness.
    I will say it again. If each experience shapes a person, even in some small way, then it becomes harder and harder to imagine sameness across a large group of free people.

    It seems to me you have to either disagree with the notion that experience shapes what it means to be us, or disregard the details of experiences which would clearly be unique in order to arrive at the conclusion that each of us are not in fact unique. 7 billion people is a lot of people, however the odds of getting the same combination of pieces when each set contains a large number of variables is mind mindbogglingly small. Another way of saying this is that it does not take many variables to make a large set of unique combinations.

    It seems to me this particular "bias" is more about resolution of inquiry, or philosophy and what you think defines a person, than it is about psychology.

    On one end you have individuals dismissing the features of personality the opposition points at, essentially claiming they are trivial. Then the rebuttal points out the arbitrary nature of the level of inquiry chosen. Philosophically speaking it should be clear how impossible the task of deciding what goes into defining even a simple thing, no less a complex thing. 

    Now, most people think they are special, this IMHO is not the same at all. You could be unique, and not special at all. Again I strongly feel this is more a matter or scale, or resolution, than of uniqueness. 1+1=2, and that is always true. In a set of 3 [1,2,3], each are unique, but not necessarily special.

    Uniqueness is a objective mathematical concept, being special is a subjective and in line with psychological aspects of bias. It may be unwieldy to call it special bias, or specialness bias or feeling special bias, but the term unique just makes a mess of the meanings involved and the focus of the topic.

    .02

  17. @Dylandesuu

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    "When we're in some kind of discussion or we go into a different culture, [it is important] that we recognize that the world looks different for other people…" 

    Recognizing cognitive bias may be an important issue. However, even the idea of bringing up the topic of confirmation bias is in itself confirmation bias; the idea that in our Western cultures we value the discussion of biases as opposed to not, because of the societies in which we are raised. From a linguistic anthropological perspective, it is even ingrained into the kinds of phrases we use, such as "Do as the Romans do." We value cultural differences and when we are faced with different ideas upon entering a new culture, we believe the best discourse is to try our best and assimilate into that culture, whether it be to learn a bit of the language, try some of the foods, or try and understand the local beliefs. 

    However, this concept is not universally held. For the thousands of Muslims entering Western Europe, or Latin Americans coming into the United States, just as an example, are they really sitting down and pondering, "Hey, we all have cognitive biases, and maybe the best way of dealing with intercultural relations is to recognize those biases and put in an effort in regards to local assimilation?" 

    We ourselves recognize that the world is different and we should try to follow in the footsteps of those from the culture in which we enter. It is generally looked down upon to not learn at least some of the language and gestures of the host country, not dress in an appropriate fashion, and not try to regard the beliefs of those as different but equal to our own. We our quick to condemn those who do not adopt the local customs as "arrogant" or "ignorant Westerners." We do this to ourselves, but why do we not hold the same standard for those entering our own cultures? Why do we not ask those entering our cultures to check THEIR biases at the front door in regard to understanding our cultures? At worst, we are labeled as "intolerant" for believing that someone entering our culture should try and adopt some of our ways while they are there, yet when we go abroad we call ourselves "intolerant" for NOT adopting the local customs.

  18. @neilc.reinhardt8769

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

    Leo Tolstoy

  21. @Shigeru-r5o

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Sometimes I think I'd be better off if I had never heard of logical fallacies, cognitive biases, Socratic ignorance, etc.. I'd be quite dumb, yes, but very confident.

  31. @MiaGadegaard

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    I've been arguing with people a lot in general, and in my angry teen years I was convinced I was right and everyone else was stupid.. but nowadays I've kinda come to realize that doesn't really work out in discussions, because I am biased myself undoubtedly, but I'm trying to take that into consideration too, but the other person(s) I'm arguing with are very biased too in favor of their own opinions.

    So I've found that trying to stick with factual arguments that everyone theoretically can agree with/(more importantly) can't disagree with, is a good way to go as it ideally goes beyond these cognitive biases that everyone has, including myself.

  33. @rtjtjcdihgysupdrzvorief

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Being aware of your bias makes life unbearable. You know that your intuition is wrong, that your personality is worthless since it separates you from the truth. Thinking doesn't make happy at all, but I can't stop. So now I can see the truth, that every relevance I will ever perceive is given by myself. Might as well stop giving anything relevance. Lost in constant abstraction I'm divided from the ability of true (and blind) happiness, forced by my conscience to look for the truth all the time.

  37. @waltherjohnson

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    what if i consider everyone, and every single person unique? i think i could probably try to do that without hurting my view of the world. Would that still count as uniqueness bias? I really don't like the idea of fooling myself, so yeah, i'd like to see a little bit more of reality.

  38. @pogmog

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    All of these bias-orientated videos seem to be a soft explanation of the hermeneutic circle. Why doesn't Big Think cut to the chase and just have someone talk about Heidegger's philosophy, which, despite being many decades old, is much more robust.

  40. @gabrielbraga6749

    December 31, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Ants and social animals in general are also "with themselves 24/7" and they seem to behave just as if they're the opposite of unique (thinking about their bias too is just as fascinating, by the way). So, although I agree with the exposed, I think a point has been missed by using that as an argument. Nice video. Loved the reflection!

Comments are closed.

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