J.D. Trout

This course presents a state-of-the-art discussion of research on judgment and decision-making. Decisions large and small are part of everyday life. What should I have for lunch? Should I go running? Should I pursue a relationship with this person? Will this job make me happy? Should I have this lump removed? Should I save more for a comfortable retirement? Usually, we don't make the best decisions, even when we have the best information. But the quality of our decision-strategies depends upon factors in economics, philosophy, and psychology. Philosophy contributes its canon of literature on inductive and deductive reasoning, and its focus on prescriptive questions about the purpose of good reasoning. Psychology offers experimental evidence of human capability in the area of judgment, and delineates the processing mechanisms that produce good decisions. As the science of policy, Economics describes the structural conditions that promote good decision-making, and tracks the utilities, costs and benefits (both to individuals and societies) of those decisions.

The course examines the philosophical and psychological foundations of decision-making. It considers philosophical issues relating to inductive and deductive reasoning, issues such as rationality, truth, and the improvement of reasoning. The course examines existing psychological research on decision-making, and discusses the impact of psychological biases on personal decisions and public policies. It will also treat such issues as: psychological models of deliberate vs. automatic processes, intergenerational aspects of decision-making, and the scientific findings on happiness and well-being. All of these goals contribute to the improvement of reasoning, and an understanding of the sources of our errors. Accordingly, the course will examine the merits of individual and social planning as a way of compensating for the psychological biases that otherwise spontaneously control us.

We will use two texts for this course:

Gilovich, T. 1991. How We Know What Isn't So. New York: Free Press.
Trout, J.D. 2010. Why Empathy Matters: The Science and Psychology of Better Judgment. New York: Penguin.

Interested students may want to look at the websites of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making, two excellent organizations whose work is well-represented in this course.

There will also be about 20 articles of various length posted on Blackboard.

Grading: Your final grade will be determined by performance on 5 exams.