You make thousands of decisions everyday.

Many of these decisions use heuristic processing, where your brain uses mental shortcuts or rule of thumb to make a choice.

This is fast and easy and serves you well most of the time.

When decisions are more complex or important, you use systematic processing.

This is slower and harder.

Your brain always likes to take the easy way.

As a result, you are prone to errors in your thinking or biases.

These errors can lead to wrong conclusions or poor decision.

It is hard to get rid of your biases because they are usually subconscious.

We are better at identifying biases in other people, but not good at recognising them in ourselves.

Emotions can also effect the way you make decisions.

You can make difference decisions about the same event depending on how you feel.

Being aware of your emotions and knowing that your thinking might be biased is a good starting point.

Try and actively practice making fewer errors in thinking and decision making processes in your everyday life.

Our goal in this course is to help you make rational, informed decisions on behalf of your child. In further sessions, we will look at some decision making methods which might help you reduce your cognitive biases.