>> Hello and welcome to
another video from the module: Attribution.
After seeing the cognitive biases and logical fallacy,
let's learn together in this lesson how to manage them.
Now that we gathered some knowledge to
identify biases and logical fallacies,
it's about time to see how we can avoid
them or manage them or mitigate them,
which is the main objective of this lesson.
Basically, the cognitive bias mitigation,
consists of the reduction of
negative effects of cognitive biases.
But can we totally avoid our biases? My answer is no.
Errors in analysis may happen and it is
extremely difficult exercise for
analysts to defeat their biases,
especially the experience at once.
By improving understanding of biases,
it becomes easier to identify and mitigate
the impact of
flawed reasoning and decision-making conventions.
An increasing number of
academic and professional disciplines are
identifying means of cognitive bias mitigation.
Let's see how we can manage our biases.
First, it is highly recommended to
avoid making decisions under time pressure.
Our ability to detect and correct an error in
judgment significantly worsen when
we are deciding under pressure.
Second, it is also advised to avoid making
decisions when we are
cognitively involved in different tasks.
Some researchers show that
performance on puzzles file tasks,
reduces if participants are
asked to keep some numbers in their heads,
while they are solving the puzzle.
What matters here,
isn't how many emails you
reply or how many lines of code your write,
what matters instead, is
the quality of your thinking and decisions.
Third, it's important to
train yourself to think statistically.
Statistical thinking is taxing,
so it doesn't come to us intuitively.
Humans overweight low and high probabilities and
completely ignore very low and very high probabilities.
Finally, please always review your findings with peers.
Ask others to review your conclusions.
Sometimes others will see things that you missed or
can identify gaps in
your argument that need to be addressed.
They also provide affirmations that
your conclusions are sound
and reasonable given your data.
People tend to make
mistakes when there is too much information,
complex information or
information linked to probabilities.
Do remember the analysis methods and techniques
that we discussed in one of our previous modules?
I mean, the structured analytic
techniques such as analysis of competing hypotheses,
devil's advocacies, cyber kill chain,
diamond model, and courses of actions.
The biggest contribution of these methods,
is to have analysts defeat and
manage their biases and fallacies.
Let's take the example of anchoring.
Because in cyber threat intelligence,
there is new information emerging every second and
anchoring would be one of
the most common difficult biases to defeat.
This is why working on an analysis using the technique of
competing hypothesis or ACH is good in this situation,
with a condition of rethinking new sets of hypotheses,
whenever there is new information available.
Please do not fall in the trap
of tweaking the old hypothesis,
because it will only lead to errors in conclusions.
After taking the time to review our experiences,
professional environment, and decision-making habits,
we will all likely find that
some of these biases impact us,
our teams or our companies more heavily than others.
It is critical, even in
today's environment of never ending alerts and
dangers that cybersecurity teams
and professionals slow down
and think more deeply and
strategically in order to combat their biases.
If not, we may find that biases
are blinding us to the real threats.
This is why we dedicated
this lesson to see if we can really avoid
our biases and how can we manage them
using some of the techniques that
we learned in previous lessons.
We have also discussed the anchoring bias and how
can we manage this bias using the technique of ATH.
The next video will be the last one for this module.
It will be covering the nation state attribution topic.