The purposes of this seminar are to survey what is known about human decisionmaking, individual and collective, and to give students practical research experience. "Decision" is a useful, albeit labile, frame for thinking about many instances of human behavior. It is used to organize our thinking about volitional circumstances from simple gambles to the use of nuclear weapons. In the modal application of the decision frame, an individual or group has knowledge and control of the available courses of action, estimates of the consequences of choosing any particular action, ordered preferences (values on estimated future consequences), and a necessity to act or not. Even where these concepts are not very descriptive of what precedes an action, they may be descriptive of the post hoc explanations for actions - rationalizations of actions. Each student in the class will complete an original research project of one of the following types: (1) replicate and then attempt to disprove empirically a published hypothesis; (2) construct a computational model to perform a specific decision task; or (3) provide an optimal solution to a real-non-trivial decision problem. Please visit the Heinz School's website for a more detail course description: The URL is www.heinz.cmu.edu
