Seminar on Personal Prejudices and Cognitive Biases [2025 Edition]

OVERVIEW

Understanding unconscious cognitive biases and prejudices is essential to promoting fair outcomes. This seminar aims to raise judges’ and administrative decision-makers’ awareness of prejudices and unconscious cognitive biases and to propose strategies to prevent them from having an impact on their decisions.

The program aims to provide participants with tools to recognize personal prejudices and unconscious cognitive biases that interfere with the decision-making process, help judges and administrative decision-makers to address these biases and prejudices, and encourage them to suspend their judgment and maintain deliberative engagement until the end of the decision-making process.

Several strategies are offered during this training, including checklists to detect biases, decision-making matrices, and breakdowns, sequencing the reception of information in a manner that reduces the effects of these biases and prejudices and considering an outside view in evaluating the facts and law.

Topics Overview:

• What are personal prejudices and unconscious cognitive biases and why should adjudicators care about them?
• How does the decision-making process unfold?
• What are the instances in which these biases and prejudices present themselves in the decision-making process?
• How can we reduce the influence of prejudices and biases on adjudicators?

Bilingual program with simultaneous interpretation.
Participation in this program is approved under Section 41 (1) of the Judges Act.

Schedule: 11:00 am – 5:00 pm (Eastern Time)

CO-CHAIRS

• The Honourable Justice Peter Lauwers, Court of Appeal for Ontario
• The Honourable Justice James W. O’Reilly, Federal Court, CIAJ’s Past President
• The Honourable Justice Daniel W. Payette, Superior Court of Québec

REGISTRATION

This program is for judges and administrative decision-makers only. To register, please contact the Project Manager of Judicial Programs, Vicki Gondek:
Tel.: 514-731-2855, extension 6
Email: vicki.gondek@ciaj-icaj.ca

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

• Inability to attend may result in a registration being transferred to a colleague of the same organization up to 7 days before the Event. The request must be made in writing.
• Cancellation incurs processing fees as follows: $100 for cancellations 30 days or more before the event and 50% of the registration fee for cancellations 7 days or more before the event. No refund will be extended for cancellations made less than 7 days before the event.