Systems Psychology

Catalog description

This course emphasizes human psychological effects, human performance, performance limitations, and error mechanisms as primary components of sociotechnical systems of various designs and complexities. It focuses on human cognitive performance within these joint cognitive systems. The course explains the relationship between systems psychology and systems engineering, cognitive systems engineering, systems thinking, and systems science, and how human factors engineers employ these disciplines to positively impact the design and development of complex sociotechnical systems for the purpose of optimizing system efficiency, effectiveness, and safety. It emphasizes the need for critical thinking, analysis, reasoning, problem solving, risk assessment, and decision-making skills to accomplish this. It further examines how human psychology affects not just the system users, but all system stakeholders, including the system designers. The course provides both theoretical knowledge and practical application of the impact of human psychological performance on system conceptualization, design, development, testing, and employment over the system lifespan. This is accomplished through the lens of current system technological capability as well as that of likely future technological advancements, and all focused on improving human/systems integration (HSI).