Behavioural influencing in the digital age: cognitive biases and fake news

This is the time we are drinking from an information firehose. At the same time we need to understand 'soft facts', 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. Cognitive biases help us to process all this information to be able to make quick decisions. However, this has a serious downside. Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgement. It's full of prejudice in knowledge, insights, research and judgement. It's also unconscious, so it's difficult to overcome when you're not aware of it. I would like to help you build some basic awareness of common cognitive biases exploited by fake news and biases in doing (on- or offline) research. Awareness is not enough though so I'll give you some pointers in methods and techniques to overcoming such biases as well. It's becoming more and more important to be aware of how your own behaviour is being influenced, especially in the domain of (cyber) security.