Identifying cognitive biases to harden in a context of cognitive warfare – ANTIGONE

Cognitive warfare refers to the alteration of an adversary's mechanisms for understanding the real world and making decisions in order to destabilize or even paralyze him. Its implementation relies in particular on the existence of cognitive biases that are consubstantial with human cognition. Biases can be observed when, in a certain situation, a subject makes a reasoning error by using a heuristic rather than a logical law. They are particularly present and deleterious in stressful situations that are favored by the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the current environment ("VUCA" environment), an environment that all military and civilian defense command/directorate actors must face.
This multidisciplinary project aims to identify the cognitive biases that impact decision making in uncertain and therefore stressful situations at the level of civilian and military decision makers (leaders). It aims to identify cognitive biases by integrating inter-individual variability (noise) to better protect against them in strategic, tactical and operational situations. It can be applied to the first two levels of cognitive warfare by taking into account: (i) the need to protect oneself from one's own individual and collective certainties. The reality of the "VUCA" world particularly induces the need to consider the cognitive adaptation capacities of individuals to tolerate uncertainty, in situations of increasing volatility, complexity and ambiguity; and (ii) the need to train oneself to defend against permanent informational aggressions and the opportunistic exploitation by an adversary of cognitive biases, likely to constrain the decision-making process and to deviate it, or even paralyse it.

This project is based on field studies in the military and defense sector using qualitative (e.g., explanatory interviews) and quantitative (e.g., psychophysiological monitoring under stress) methodologies to address three needs in the field of cognitive warfare psychophysiological monitoring in situations of constraint) to meet three needs in the field of cognitive warfare: (i) the need to establish a map of the leader's biases of interest (command/direction level) in order to identify blocking biases and problem biases; (ii) the need to validate the map in a situation and according to the metacognitive profiles of the leaders; and (iii) the need to better understand the impact of the biases on the functioning of the group. The answers to these three needs will allow us to offer leaders a cognitive training deliverable to optimize the identification and consideration of biases under constraints. This deliverable will be based on the use of an immersive environment and on actions to reinforce metacognition.
The training deliverable on bias detection for training in a context of cognitive warfare is based on a multidisciplinary and complementary consortium that integrates at each stage of the project communication and promotion actions to support the anchoring of the need in the military and defense environment. It is a first step to build and deploy a larger scale training program.
Finally, this project is voluntarily inscribed in a humanistic view of cognitive warfare in order to bring elements of training that respect cognitive functioning to commanders/decision-makers subjected to multiform cognitive warfare modalities.