How Cognitive Biases Interfere with How We Acquire Knowledge. Presented by Dr. Karolina Westlund

Given how behaviorists, ethologists, neuroscientists and veterinarians often get into conflict, this talk discusses how our cognitive biases impact knowledge acquisition. Cognitive biases make us reject information that we should accept and accept information that we should reject.

The aim of this session is to open attendees’ minds more to how biases arise and how problematic this is, and to facilitate difficult discussions with people from other backgrounds.

In this talk, the presenter will discuss a handful of them:

Learning Objectives

• The curse of knowledge.
• Authority bias.
• The illusory truth effect.
• The availability cascade.
• Tribal epistemology.
• Confirmation bias.
• The Semmelweiss effect.
• The backfire effect.
•  Reactance.
• The Dunning-Kruger effect.

Your Presenters- Dr. Karolina Westlund

Karolina Westlund helps pet lovers and animal professionals get happier animals that thrive in the care of humans. She grew up pining for a kitten for several years, and pestering her parents until they gave up. The green-eyed black half-siamese cat that she got for her seventh birthday became a true friend who lived to be 21 years old, but an easily startled cat who often went into hiding when there were visitors.

Karolina had grand ideas about becoming a field biologist, but that never came about – the closest she got was working as a trekking travel guide in France and Madeira. Instead she majored in Ethology and developed a passionate interest in animal welfare seen through a multidisciplinary lens, including Behaviour Analysis and Affective Neuroscience. She is now an Associate Professor of Ethology at the University of Stockholm, mostly teaching how behaviour management can be used to improve animal welfare.

She offers live seminars, free online webinars and masterclasses in addition to more extensive online courses, as well as the occasional blog post or scientific publication on the topic of enrichment, animal training and wellbeing. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with her husband, two kids, and, hopefully soon, another cat.

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