Gillian Tett wrote in the Financial Times (see below) an article on cognitive biases in the global threat landscape, referring to a manual by the Swiss Federal Intelligence Services on cognitive blind spots.

She links to the Situation Report of the Federal Intelligence Service “Switzerland's Security 2025” but not to the manual.

Does anyone in this community have a link to this document?

Why we should know what we don’t know

Cognitive blind spots are undermining our ability to see the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be

Gillian Tett, Financial Times, 3 January 2026

A decade ago, the Swiss government made an optimistic decision: it dismantled the last of the cold war explosives it had previously installed in its roads, bridges and tunnels to deter an invasion.

The reason? At the start of the 21st century, western elites generally assumed that globalisation, democracy and the free market were self-evidently good, and would keep spreading, creating peace. It thus seemed pointless to plan for a putative invasion.

No longer. As 2026 dawns, “the security situation around Switzerland is deteriorating year by year [and] a global confrontation is emerging”, as a recent report from the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service points out. So, Swiss leaders — like other governments — are now scrambling to rebuild their defences, as they realise that they misread the future.

More striking still, the FIS has also published a manual about cognitive blind spots. “Many people have little to no knowledge of how human thinking works,” the handbook laments, urging the FIS staff to reflect on their mental biases to better understand both the present and future.

More specifically, the manual identifies 18 different cognitive biases that hamper our thinking, such as “group think” (adhering to the cosy assumptions of our tribe), “anchoring” (relying exclusively on whatever information we see first, say on social media), “confirmation bias” (only seeing data that reinforces pre-existing views), “mirror imaging” (assuming others think like us), the “absence of evidence” bias (failing to think about the data we lack) and “survivorship bias” (judging data only with success stories, not failures).

It is excellent advice — and not just for spooks. After all, 2025 was a jarring experience for anyone raised in the late 20th century western zeitgeist: globalisation was undermined by nationalism, free-market principles were corroded by government meddling; and democracy lost ground to oligarchs. The latter is the opposite of what had been expected, as Anne Applebaum notes in her book Autocracy, Inc.

So as 2026 gets under way, the question is how to make sense of these disorienting shocks? History offers one helpful frame. What is happening today echoes, in some ways, the zeitgeist of a century ago, when great powers vied for hegemonic control (ie dominance) between the world wars.

More specifically, what we are essentially witnessing today is a geoeconomic contest between the US, China and Russia, in which economic policy tools are being used for political ends.

America wields hegemonic power in this fight in finance, because it controls the world’s reserve currency. China has hegemonic power in manufacturing because it controls supply chain nodes. Tech hegemony is still contested.

And while each side wants to break the other’s hegemonic power, neither looks able to do so soon. So expect these battles to rumble on. Or for another perspective on events, look at what anthropologists refer to as “social silences”: our tendency to ignore parts of our world because of cultural frames. These are rife today.

One example is that we pay striking little attention to our dependence on vulnerable cyber infrastructure systems. Another is that western discourse pays scant attention to the fact that we live in a golden age of science (a pattern which reflects the largely non-scientific educational background of most western politicians and journalists.)

Anthropology can also shed light on US President Donald Trump’s White House. The current US government has shattered many modern western norms of rule-based, democratic systems, since it is shaped by the capricious whims of Trump, with officials wielding power depending on their proximity to the president, not an org chart.

Moreover Trump’s inner circle act as if their financial interests are with that of the state, with little shame — but an obsessive emphasis on “face” — or “honour.”

This shocks western liberals. But, as the anthropologist Matthew Engelke has noted, honour-based, kinship-focused political systems have been the rule — not exception — elsewhere in the world.

So one way to parse the White House is to treat it like a Tudor royal court — an insight that Swiss business leaders recently took to heart, when they visited Trump bearing symbolic tributes of Rolex watches and a gold bar.

However, the discipline that Swiss intelligence now prefers to stress is psychology. It can help us understand the behaviour of narcissistic rulers such as Trump. But arguably as important is what psychology tells us about our own mental blinkers — including the failure of so many western liberal elites to anticipate Trump’s rise.

Is there any solution to all these biases? The FIS offers some: “stress test your beliefs”; “think statistically”; “ask yourself what you know and what you don’t”; “show intellectual modesty”, deploy “creative thinking” and periodically “think the opposite” of your assumptions, to break out of our cosy intellectual echo chambers.

Call this, if you like, the fight against tunnel vision. It is painfully hard. But in 2026 we need it more than ever. Remember that when you next see a real Swiss tunnel.