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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how unconscious cognitive biases shape development cooperation practice and policy, operating as hidden micro-level mechanisms through which dominant forms of knowledge production and power asymmetries are reproduced in the Global North’s engagement with the Global South.

Paper long abstract

Critical development and postdevelopment scholarship has long demonstrated that international development cooperation is not a neutral endeavour, but one deeply embedded in historical power relations, colonial legacies, and Eurocentric modes of knowledge production. Despite increasing rhetorical commitments to partnership, participation, and decolonisation, development practices continue to reproduce asymmetrical relations between the Global North and the Global South.

While much of the literature has focused on discourses, institutions, and political economy, considerably less attention has been paid to the cognitive mechanisms through which these asymmetries are reproduced in everyday development practice. In particular, the role of unconscious cognitive biases - implicit assumptions, perceptions, and evaluative frameworks that operate below the level of conscious reflection - remains underexplored in postdevelopment and postcolonial analyses.

This paper seeks to bridge this gap by integrating insights from postdevelopment theory, postcolonial political thought, and cognitive bias research, in order to analyse how unconscious biases shape development cooperation practices and sustain colonial patterns of thought and action. It stipulates that cognitive biases function as micro-level mechanisms through which macro-level postcolonial power asymmetries are continually reinforced in everyday development practice.

The author aims to contribute to the decolonial advancement of development theory and practice by foregrounding the psychological and discursive dimensions of unequal power relations in development cooperation. In doing so, she bridges a gap between postcolonial critique, institutional analysis, and cognitive bias research, with implications for teaching, organisational development, and policy design in international development cooperation.