Honors Seminar on How to Make Better Decisions is Open to All Students

Attention GVPT students. HONR229D: How to Make Better Decisions is open to all students who have a 3.4 GPA or higher until the seats are filled. Please contact Dean Hebert (dhebert@umd.edu) if you are interested to request permission to register.

HONR229D Honors Seminar: How to Make Better Decisions

Piotr Swistak, Professor

Department of Government and Politics and the Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computation Program

Th 2:00pm - 4:45pm TYD 0101

The problem with decisions is that we rarely, if ever, find out if our decisions were good or bad.  Was choosing your major, for instance, a good decision or could you have made a better one?  I don’t think most of us would ever know the answer to this question.  So, is it possible that we regularly make bad decisions but don’t know that we do?  And, if so, how can we fix something if don’t know it is broken? 

In fact, we do regularly make bad decisions.  This has been shown in many experimental studies some of which will be covered in this class.  What is more, for some types of decision problems we are hardwired to make mistakes.  This means that we are bound to go wrong regardless of how much we know or how smart we are.  So, what can we do to remedy this problem?  Quite a bit, as it turns out.