Picture a journalist, a scientist, or even your neighbour declaring with solemn authority: “I am being objective.” Dignified, is it not? Objective, impartial, fact-driven, like a well-polished broom sweeping all bias into the corner. Only, as with most magical brooms, it has a particular corner it prefers: the one that…
We humans adore a simple dichotomy. It’s frightfully efficient. White or non-white. Male or female. Disabled or abled. These binaries promise neatness in a messy world, a cognitive filing system for complex humanity. Yet as philosopher Val Plumwood observed, these “master/slave” frameworks operate through five dangerou…
As Israel’s slaughter in Gaza grinds on, now in its twentieth month, with over 45,000 dead, most of them women and children, and nearly every hospital, school, and home reduced to rubble, one might expect Europe, that self-proclaimed bastion of human rights, to muster more than a few limp statements of concern. Instead…
The human mind is a marvel of evolution – capable of breathtaking creativity, yet equally adept at constructing elaborate prisons of its own making. At the heart of this paradox lies our mindset, that curious mental lens through which we interpret everything from our abilities to impending apocalypses. Psychologists, i…
The elephant in the room, the one everyone recognises, is overt bias: those charmingly blatant attitudes and prejudices someone proudly wears on their sleeve. It’s delightfully obvious and enables some truly impressive mental gymnastics. Then there’s the other elephant, the one lurking in the shadows, rarely discussed.…
The eternal quest to prove that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, neurologically speaking, of course. For over a century, scientists (and, let’s be honest, people with opinions) have been poking at brains, measuring corpus callosums, and squinting at amygdalae, all in the noble pursuit of confirming whatever …