| MWF 11-12, Stiteler B26 |
Teaching assistant: Marie Forgeard
(mariefd@psych.upenn.edu)
Office hours: Tues 3-4, Fri 2-3, or by appointment.
Office:
Positive Psychology Center,
Room 210 (2nd fl.), 3701 Market St. (show PennCard at entrance).
This course meets the quantitative data analysis requirement of the College. Please consider other ways of meeting that requirement. (Note that most statistics courses meet the requirement, so you should not need this course if you have taken what is now a prerequisite.)
It no longer meets the formal analysis requirement.
It is among the required options for the consumer psychology minor, but Psych 153 does not emphasize applications to consumer psychology.
It counts toward the psychology major and the PPE major. I do emphasize applications to public policy, as well as medical decision making.
This course addresses the ideal standards of judgment and decision making, and the ways in which people fall short according to these standards. Understanding of the ideals and our limitations can help improve judgments and decisions in such fields as medicine, law, and public policy.
This syllabus will be revised often. Use the reload button on your browser to make sure you have the latest version.
Email, appointments, mailing list
I check my email several times per day. I try to answer all questions, as does the TA. To make an appointment with me, check my schedule in my web page and then send me an email message saying when you want to meet and (in at least one sentence) what it is about.
Assignments may be submitted through the web (with special forms provided for each one), or pdf if they contain fugures. The assignments will be revised extensively - including the number of them, their due dates, and their contribution to the grade - so do not do them before I announce that you should. I have not yet begin these revisions.
The course has a mailing list, for which you can sign up, if you are not already signed up. The list has archives so that you can see what you missed or lost.
I will do as little lecturing as possible about what is in the textbook (which I wrote). Instead, I will provide a list of topics from the book that will be covered on the exams, and we will have review sessions about them.
I will devote more of the classes to demonstrations, which will be the basis of assignments. These demonstrations will of course be related to the topics of the course, but many topics do not lend themselves to demonstrations, so I will not cover some of these in class. Thus, the classes will emphasize deeper discussion of a few topics, and I will rely on the book for a broad overview of the field, and for background on each demonstration and assignment.
Exams, assignments, and grades There are some assignments (which are graded). You may submit drafts of the last assignment for comments. I must receive drafts at least a week before the due date. (No exceptions for any reason. Don't ask. You can actually submit a draft at any time during the term.) You will get the draft back in time for you to make revisions.
The midterm and final will consist of short essay questions. They will include both topics in the reading and topics covered in class. Exams are open-book, typed, time- and page-limited, and submitted by web form. The midterm and final will be designed for two hours of work (including both writing and looking things up). The starting time is somewhat flexible. I can instruct the computer to send you the exam at a particular time. If you leave campus before the final exam, you can do it remotely. I will send exams to your Penn email address.
Grades will be based on a weighted sum of all work. Approximate weights (in percent of grade) were (last time the course was taught): assignments 45% (the last assignment being the biggest part of this), midterm 25%, final 30%. Each score will be standardized and multiplied by its weight, and then the weighted scores will be added up. Lateness will be penalized.
I will follow the rules of the University and the College of Arts and Sciences, including rules about incompletes and the Code of Academic Integrity.
I plan to revise this syllabus often. Do not just print it and expect it to remain accurate. And make sure your browser is set to reload pages that have been revised (or reload all pages).
Links for the names of topic go to slides that I may present in class. You should be able to print these if you want to, before class. But please wait until the last minute to do that, as I am constantly revising. To print the slides using Firefox without wasting paper, use the menus: "View / Use Style / print," then "File / Print." The slides are not intended as a complete outline of what I plan to cover.
9/9 to 9/14
Thinking, creativity, and logic: T1-4.
Class activities on creativity and logic.
Assignment 1 (see slides for first class) due midnight 9/10 (except for late joiners)
9/16 to 9/18
Probability: T5,
Clinical trials
Class activity and homework on personal probability estimation).
Assignment 2, first part due midnight 9/20 (except for late joiners)
second part due midnight 9/27 (two attempts allowed) [NO LONGER AVAILABLE]
9/21 to 9/23
Probability and
calibration: T6
Dick Cavett on coincidences
Class activity on coincidences.
9/25 Hypothesis testing: T7, Intelligent design
9/28
Correlation and contingency: T8.
Class activity on contingency judgment.
9/30
Irrational belief persistence: T9.
Sunstein.
Why groups go to extremes.
Assignment 3 due midnight 10/4.
10/2 to 10/7 Utility: T10.
10/9 to 10/14 Decisions under uncertainty: T11
10/16 Midterm exam (default time, 11-1)
10/21 Reference dependence in choice: T12, Tritch, T. (2007). Helping people help themselves.
Assignment 4, first part, due midnight 10/23
Assignment 4, second part, due midnight 10/29
10/23 to 11/2
Utility measurement and
decision analysis: T13, T14,
Cost-benefit analysis in health care
Singer, P. (2009). Why we must ration health care
Keeney, R. L. (1992). Value-focused thinking: A path to
creative decisionmaking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, pp. 3-87, 147-148 (possibly in
Rosengarten), or
Keeney, R. L. (2002).
Common mistakes in making value trade-offs.
Operations Research, 50 (6), 935-945.
Mullin, B., Mullin, M., and Mullin, R. (2008).
Mhairi’s Dilemma: A study of decision analysis at work
(pdf version).
11/4
Judgment: T15.
Class activities on judging the mean, making predictions.
11/6 to 11/18
Moral thinking, utilitarianism, and
fairness: T16, T17,
Million-dollar Murray (Gladwell)
Bailout (Collins)
Class activity on fairness vs. efficiency
11/23
Negotiations (TW-R)
Class activity on negotiation. (
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, guest lecturer.)
11/24 Assignment 5 due (see details for extra credit)
11/20, 11/25 and 11/30
social dilemmas, and voting:
T18,
G. Hardin (1968),
The tragedy of the commons. (Science, 162, 1243-1248).
Approval voting
(Wikipedia)
12/2 to 12/4 Intertemporal choice: T19
12/7 to 12/9 Risk: T20 Airport security follies
12/11 Final draft of Assignment 6 due
12/22 Final exam: 9-11 (by email, like the midterm, with some time flexibility)
Assignment 5: Decision analysis
Carry out a multi-attribute analysis of some decision that you might face. (Be imaginative if you wish. You might, for example, be president of a country some day.) Make sure that the decision has at least three options and at least three attributes.
This is not a paper. You don't need to go on at great length describing the decision in words. Just include the minimum to make it clear what the decision is about, and what the attributes are, if that is not clear from their names.
You will benefit most if you think about fundamental values in Keeney's sense. So, if you make up an initial list of things that you care about, ask yourself why you care about each one. You may find that there is some deeper goal that motivates it. Keeney gives several other helpful suggestions to discover fundamental values. For example, one decision you might face is choosing a career. Many of the things that people say when asked for their values about this are superficial, e.g., that they want their career to be ``interesting.'' What is interesting to you may depend on your other fundamental values about what you want your life to mean, what you want to use it for. The values in the birth-control example below resulted from application of Keeney's method by several students in a former class.
Repeated decisions, like what to eat, are good for this assignment, because the emphasis is on the discovery of values. You can put aside the complications that result from the fact that one of your goals in many decisions is variety.
You should hand in something like one of the examples we discussed in class. Do not worry about the precision of assigning values to intermediate cases. Do worry about assigning weights. You should explain how you did that for one attribute (relative to the most important one). Make sure you do the reading before you do this.
The weights are determined first by picking the most important attribute range and then comparing other ranges to that. You can pick the most important range in two ways. Ask yourself which is more important, the difference between the top and bottom of one range (as you have defined the top and bottom) or the difference between the top and bottom of another. (Alternatively, you could make up a hypothetical decision, e.g., between two option that are identical except that one is best on attribute A and worst on B and the other is the opposite.)
The simplest way to determine weights is by direct judgment. How big is the difference between the top and bottom of the smaller range, compared to the difference between the top and bottom of the larger range (or vice versa)? (See the text for other methods.) Make sure to explain how you have done this for one attribute. If you did what I just said, say that you did this, using one example.
In addition, you should carry out and explain at least one test of consistency. A test involves estimating one of the weights in two different ways and explaining how you resolved any disagreement that you found. One way is to make judgments relative to some attribute other than the largest and then check ratio consistency: if the weight of attribute B relative to A is .6 and the weight of C relative to A is .3, then the weight of C relative to B should be .5.
Here is a form for submitting the assignment.
Extra credit assignment:
Do another decision analysis that uses probabilities in some way, such as the amn3~iocentesis decision. This would be best if the decision is not obvious, and complicated enough so the analysis might yield some insight. Submit this by email in any format except docx, ppt, or xls. (Pdf is probably best if you have diagrams.) This is due December 1.
Assignment 6: Discussion paper.
Write a short (absolute maximum 200 lines, 70 characters per line; minimum 25 lines) reflective discussion of some topic from the course. (Here is a form.) This should require no additional research, although you should of course acknowledge any sources that you use because you already know them (including course reading). Do not feel obliged to fill up the 200 lines; 125 should suffice if you write succinctly.
One possible format for this paper is a philosophical discussion of some question from the course, such as whether self-deception is rational (but probably not that one). Try to avoid questions that have completely trivial answers and questions so big that a book would be required to answer them. Avoid mere recapitulation of arguments in the reading as well as unsympathetic attacks on it. Avoid one-sided presentations that ignore the arguments of the other side. Feel free to ask if a topic is appropriate. A good model to follow is the discussion of self-deception on pp. 71-73 of the text, especially the discussion of whether self-deception can be rational. Feel free to skip ahead in the reading if you wish to hand in the paper early. If you choose this kind of topic, make sure to consider (and rebut, or take into account) objections to arguments you make.
Another possible format is something more like a research proposal. Take a result from the course, propose alternative explanations of it, and suggest ways of distinguishing them.
Last modified 11/10/09