Beautifully Biased Brains

As companies increasingly embrace automated products and services, they need to understand how those things make their customers feel about themselves. To date, however, managers and academics have usually focused on something quite different: understanding what customers think about those things.

Bad UX research does not stink. Anyone without training can create poor research and the output looks just as convincing to the untrained eye. This is the reason why UX research uniquely feels the push for democratization.

A sad irony is that the same cognitive bias that makes people ascribe humanity to GPT-3 can cause them to treat actual humans in inhumane ways. Sociocultural linguistics – the study of language in its social and cultural context – shows that assuming an overly tight link between fluent expression and fluent thinking can lead to bias against people ... See more

One marker that I’m seeing someone clearly is when I understand how their strengths are also their weaknesses, how their genius lives right next to their dysfunction. I know that I’m further away from clarity when I am overly excited or overly skeptical.

I think it is more helpful to talk about the underlying processes: spontaneous thought, or the decoupling of attention from perception, which is what happens when our thoughts separate from our perception of the environment. Both these processes take place during mind-wandering and daydreaming.

Smallwood learned that unhappy minds tend to wander in the past, while happy minds often ponder the future.