Journalists: all victims of cognitive bias?

The Geneva Press Club and the CFJM invite you to a conference with:

• Mona Spiridon, neuroscientist at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), curator of the “La nouvelle menace” exhibition
• Michel Danthe, journalist, theologian, former editor-in-chief of Le Matin Dimanche newspaper and Construire magazine
• Grégoire Nappey, deputy editor-in-chief, Le Temps newspaper, former editor-in-chief, Le Matin newspaper

To participate, please register using the following link:

Cognitive biases are “the new threat” endangering our society, according to Mona Spiridon, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), co-director of the Bioscope. As head of scientific outreach at the Geneva University Neurocenter, she is also curating the exhibition “The New Threat” (« La nouvelle menace »), currently on display until September 25 at the Center for Journalism and Media Training (CFJM) in Lausanne.

The CFJM and the Geneva Press Club are seizing this opportunity to open a debate on this crucial and unsettling issue. How are our opinions and prejudices formed? How can we be sufficiently aware of them to deconstruct them? How can information professionals avoid cognitive bias? Is systematic fact-checking enough to avoid them? How can we escape the dictatorship of the emotional?

The urgency and pressure that arose with the Covid-19 pandemic, the acceleration in the circulation of information and the positions taken by social networks, the massive irruption of AI and algorithms: all these factors are upsetting our last safeguards and opening the door to hasty, deleterious positions that run counter to the spirit of science and journalism. A clear threat to the balance necessary for democratic dialogue.

The exhibition “The New Threat” is on show at the CFJM in Lausanne until September 25, before moving on to the Palais de Justice in Geneva. It vividly demonstrates, through videos with different scenarios, how we can adopt one viewpoint over another from the same set of information (data, interviews, etc.).

The event will be hosted by Marc-Henri Jobin, Director of the CFJM, and Isabelle Falconnier, Director of the Geneva Press Club, followed by a cocktail reception.