“We don’t fully understand what is happening in advanced economies.”
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, the former member of the ECB’s executive board
Financial Times, April 17, 2013
Cognitive blind spots
Cognitive blind spots are undermining our ability to see the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. At the start of the 21st century, western elites generally assumed that globalisation, democracy and the free market were self-evidently good, and would keep spreading, creating peace. N o longer. FIS, Swiss Federal Intelligence Service, has published a manual about cognitive blind spots. 18 different cognitive biases that hamper our thinking, such as “group think” (adhering to the cosy assumptions of our tribe), “anchoring” (relying exclusively on whatever information we see first, say on social media), “confirmation bias” (only seeing data that reinforces pre-existing views), “mirror imaging” (assuming others think like us), “absence of evidence” bias (failing to think about the data we lack) and “survivorship bias” (judging data only with success stories, not failures). Gillian Tett Financial Times 2 January 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/...
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