Decision Making in Real Life Seminar
I designed my own senior seminar in decision making in 2017, and successfully taught the seminar in Winter 2018 and 2019. In addition to teaching decision making theories, I put emphasis on analyzing and solving real-world problems and encourage students to share their perspectives and experiences.
Course Description in a Snap Shot
This course discusses how people make everyday, from trivial to high-stakes, decisions, and how people could make more effective decisions. This is a broad survey class, which emphasizes application of psychology and decision theories to real life, drawing topics from psychology, economics, business, education, healthcare, and policymaking. In this course, you will be introduced to and examine:
1) major motivation, methods, results, and controversies of decision making research;
2) the applicability of these theories to actual decision-making problems; 3) real-life challenging decision-making problems;
4) some skills and recommendations for designing decision aids and making more effective decisions. The weekly readings are the basis of this course. The readings are grouped to present one or more current challenges and potential directions for improvement. Your life experiences and “naïve” perspectives are also valuable to shared learning.
In addition, this course aims to promote building research skills and professional development. Hands-on research exercises are built in for each class. I also encourage you to connect with active judgment and decision making researchers, for example, by attending talks and events, learning about researchers’ backgrounds. Many pioneering decision-making researchers are real-life resources for you rather than just names on a paper.
Students’ Anonymous Feedback
Haoyang’s passion for the material was infectious. I especially liked the musings or reflections we had to do. When we shared them in class, she smoothly connected ideas to current research in the field. There was also a lot of group discussion which I liked.
Haoyang is a fantastic teacher who truly cares about her students, her work, and educating about decision making. I would recommend this class to anyone interest in learning more about decision making and how it applies to everyday situations in real life.
This is my second time taking a class from Haoyang and she is one of my favorite teachers I’ve had. She’s very funny and has the best structured classes I’ve experienced. She is always coming up with new ways to involve the students and she often uses funny videos or pictures to demonstrate points. Great class!
Excellent course, expectations were clear and I learned a substantial amount about the topic at hand! Kept things interesting even though the course was a 3 hour block.
Overall, I had a very positive experience in this class. The discussions and readings were very relevant.