Decision Making, Judgment, and Problem Solving

Catalog description

This course is intended for students in the cognitive track. This course explores judgment, decision-making and problem-solving processes and focuses on the social and cognitive aspects of complex information processing. Major topics include normative, descriptive (heuristics and biases), and naturalistic approaches to decision-making, as well as selective perception, memory and hindsight biases, framing effects, social influences, group processes and human error. Models of decision-making considered include the prospect theory, expected utility theory, and Bayes’ Theorem. Problem solving will be examined from perspectives of formal, computational methods as well as intuition and creativity. Experimental methods and applications in design of systems and decision aids will receive special attention.