In this 2026 edition of Mapping Biases to Testing I will zoom in on biases I see happening when people use LLM's
Back in 2017, I gave a talk at this conference called "Mapping Biases to Testing". It was inspired by the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. In the talk I explained the difference between System One and System Two thinking, and I gave some examples of specific cognitive biases that I saw happening in myself and others at work.
Fast forward to 2026 and it feels prudent to freshen up this talk for the "LLM-era" that we seem to be living in.
We human beings are so mentally vulnerable and gullible. When we should slow down our thinking, we often end up taking the mental shortcut instead: we are biased. The widespread use of LLM's seems to have worsened the problem. The allure of offloading important (testing) tasks to a machine that doesn't care or feel is apparently irresistible for many of us. This comes at a cost: our own critical thinking skills, cognitive capabilities and other computer based skills we need to excel at our job are atrophying.
In this 2026 edition of Mapping Biases to Testing I will zoom in on biases I see happening when people use LLM's:
- anchoring effect
- confirmation bias
- cognitive dissonance
- availability heuristic
- technology bias
I will close off with a plea to you to keep using your brain. We should all embrace the friction that comes with learning. Basically, come to this talk if you still care about using your brain.