Cognitively Biased
The Online Course Exploring the Illusions of the Mind That Make us Unreasonable, Irrational, and Wrong.
$14.95
The Course of Uncomfortable Ideas
Facts Don't Care About Feelings. Science Isn't Concerned About Sensibilities. Reality Couldn't Care Less About Rage.
Enroll in The Course of Uncomfortable Ideas to master the art of embracing challenging concepts and overcoming cognitive biases for unparalleled personal and intellectual growth.
About this course
This is a course designed to help college-age and adult students appreciate and even celebrate questioning the unquestionable, thinking the unthinkable, and facing reality head on, no matter what that reality is. It is a course about uncomfortable ideas.
- Learn how problematic our brains can be when it comes to reality
- Learn why entertaining uncomfortable ideas is so important
- Learn why we avoid uncomfortable ideas
- Learn why we refuse to accept uncomfortable facts
- Learn strategies that help facilitate reason and fight these cognitive biases that lead to poor decision making and irrational beliefs
- Hear over 100 uncomfortable ideas!
This is a course about uncomfortable ideas—the reasons we avoid them, the reasons we shouldn’t, and discussion of dozens of examples that might infuriate you, offend you, or at least make you uncomfortable.
Many of our ideas about the world are based more on feelings than facts, sensibilities than science, and rage than reality. We gravitate toward ideas that make us feel comfortable in areas such as religion, politics, philosophy, social justice, love and sex, humanity, and morality. We avoid ideas that make us feel uncomfortable. This avoidance is a largely unconscious process that affects our judgment and gets in the way of our ability to reach rational and reasonable conclusions. By understanding how our mind works in this area, we can start embracing uncomfortable ideas and be better informed, be more understanding of others, and make better decisions in all areas of life.
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Psychology
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Curriculum preview
Imported lessons, grouped into real sections.
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Introduction
4 lessons
In this section, we will cover cognitive biases and why they are important, I will share a few words about myself, and we'll explore "political correctness." In section t…
A cognitive bias is like an illusion for the mind. It is a deviation from rationality in judgment.
As a social psychologist, my goal is to see issues as objectively as possible while recognizing my own biases.
Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginali…
The Uncomfortable Idea
10 lessons
In this video we cover Credibility, Expose Dangerous Thinking, Attempting to Solve the Wrong Problem, and Treating Symptoms and Not the Disease.
When we get caught up in ideology and political correctness, we overlook the downside of our actions.
Another example of the unintended consequences of avoiding uncomfortable ideas has to do with identity politics, or a political style that focuses on the issues relevant …
Depending on how passionate one might be about certain issues, one can dislike or even hate people who hold opposite views on those issues. If we want to understand why s…
Very often, one who presents fringe ideas is well aware of the common objections to the idea and like a good salesperson has crafted answers that address the objections.
One unifying force of humanity is our shared reality. Similarities bring people together while differences tend to tear us apart.
+ 2 more lessons in this section
Uncomfortable Ideas and the Reasons Why We Avoid Them
21 lessons
We can sum up all the reasons why we avoid uncomfortable ideas with the phenomenon known as "motivated reasoning." This describes how emotionally-charged ideas undergo a …
Most of the unconscious reasons fall under the general category of self-preservation and are a result of the self-serving bias, which is any cognitive or perceptual proce…
What do you think of Adolf Hitler? If I had to guess, I would say you think he was a monster. We accept that a monster can be responsible for the murder of six million Je…
We overcompensate for these positive feelings by publicly refusing to entertain these ideas.
Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of defense mechanisms, which are unconscious psychological mechanisms that reduce anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmf…
Being comfortable with or even just tolerating nuance and ambiguity is not a common characteristic found in most people.
Some ideas, especially those based strongly on reason and logic, can be seen as “cold,” “calculating,” and “lacking humanity.” When ex…
+ 13 more lessons in this section
Why We Refuse To Accept Uncomfortable Ideas
12 lessons
When a person refuses to entertain an uncomfortable idea, they shield themselves from evidence and facts that could cause them to accept the idea.
It should go without saying that one cannot evaluate evidence without being aware of the evidence.
Believability in this context refers to knowing what level of trust one should have in the source as well as knowing what constitutes evidence and how to tell the differe…
Thanks to belief-related cognitive biases and effects, sometimes facts, evidence, and reason don’t stand a chance.
+ 4 more lessons in this section
Some More Uncomfortable Ideas
15 lessons
In this section, we cover The Self-Fulfilling Nature of Social Injustice Love Isn’t Always Beautiful, and You Don’t Love Everyone People Are Much More Selfish…
One often hears the expression “I will do anything for...” in combination with a declaration of love. This is a wonderful thing... if you are the object the l…
Our behavior is controlled by our brains and most of what we believe to be selfless acts are far from selfless.
Ideas that challenge these sacred beliefs are the most uncomfortable; therefore, they are the most avoided, ignored, and dismissed.
Works of fiction often have several “plot holes” that make the story more appealing, but only if you don’t think about the plot holes.
Given everything we know about the human brain, it is clear that the mind is a function of the brain.
+ 7 more lessons in this section
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