Prerequisite
One semester of statistics or microeconomics.
Requirements that this course meets
This course counts toward the
psychology major
and is an option to meet a requirement for the
PPE major.
I do emphasize applications to public policy, as well as medical decision
making.
It meets the quantitative data analysis requirement of the College.
Please consider
other ways of meeting that requirement.
It is an option for the consumer
psychology minor, but Psych 253 does not emphasize applications to
consumer psychology.
Overview and policies
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.
In particular, there will be several assignments that are not yet included.
Email, appointments, mailing list
To make an appointment with Baron, check in his web
page and then send him 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 figures.
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.
Exams, assignments, and grades
There are some assignments (which are graded). You may submit drafts
of the last assignment for comments, at any time during the term, up
to a week before the due date. (No exceptions for any reason.)
Otherwise, do not do any other assignments until told that they are
ready.
The midterm and final will consist of short essay questions, and
possibly short-answer questions. They will cover 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 35% (the last assignment being the biggest part of this),
midterm 30%, final 35%. Each score will be standardized and
multiplied by its weight, and then the weighted scores will be added
up. Lateness will be penalized.
We will follow the rules of the University and the College of Arts
and Sciences, including rules about incompletes and the Code of Academic
Integrity. In particular, you may study together, but you cannot
hand in identical text for any exams or assignments.
Schedule (subject to revision on short notice)
The letter T stands for
Thinking and deciding. It is available at the Penn Book
Center (not the Penn Bookstore). Other reading is listed with each
topic. M stands for Prof. Barbara Mellers, B for Prof. Jon Baron, L
for Justin Landy, and R for Ann Marie Roepke.
Links for the names of topic go to slides that we will 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. To
print Baron's 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.
9/7
Introduction (M):
T1-3.
9/12
Multiattribute decisions (M): T13, T14
9/14
Decision analysis (M): T5
9/19
Probability (B): T5,
Strogatz on Bayes's theorem,
Class activity and homework on personal probability estimation.
Wikipedia page
(very good reference, not required)
Assignment 1 due at the end of 9/20 (Tuesday)
9/21
Hypothesis testing (B): T7,
Intelligent design
9/26
The value of information (M)
9/26
Assignment 2, first part due by the end of the day
9/28
Logic (B): T4.
10/3
Heuristics in probability judgment (M): T6.
10/5
Midterm
10/7
Assignment 2, second part due at the end of the day.
10/12
Irrational belief persistence (L): T9.
10/17
Subjective well-being (R)
10/19
Money and happiness (M)
10/21
Assignment 3, first part due at the end of the day.
10/24
Utility (B): T10-11.
10/26
Reference dependence in choice (B): T12,
10/28
Assignment 3, second part due at the end of the day.
10/31
Risk (B): T20,
Airport security follies,
The odds
of airborne terror (Nate Silver)
11/2
Intertemporal choice (M and B): T19
11/7
Correlation and contingency (B): T8.
(and will begin Moral thinking, T16)
11/9
Moral thinking and utilitarianism (B): T16.
11/14
Fairness (B): T16, T17,
Bailout (Collins)
11/16
Exercise on negotiation (M)
11/21
Negotiation (M)
Supplement (with Bazerman example)
11/23
Social dilemmas (B):
T18,
G. Hardin (1968),
The tragedy of the commons. (Science, 162, 1243-1248).
Approval voting
(Wikipedia)
Edlin et al.: Vote for charity's sake
11/28
Voting (B)
11/30
Linear models of judgment (M): T15.
12/5
Carter racing exercise (M)
12/7
Review (M)
12/16, 6-8 PM
Final exam default time
Assignment 1: Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis
Carry out a multi-attribute analysis for your partner, and he or she will do the
same for you. Take a decision that matters to him or her (a nontrivial personal
decision). Here is
a link to the form in which we want you to submit your homework.
Describe your partner's decision problem.
Make sure that your partner comes up with at least three options and at least three
attributes and at least 2 levels of each attribute. Repeated decisions such as what
to have for lunch are more difficult than they seem, because the real options are
policies.
Ask you partner what he or she views as the most important or "fundamental" values.
For example, your partner might face a career decision. Many of the things that
people say when asked for their values are superficial, e.g., that they want their
career to be "interesting." What is interesting to you may depend on bigger issues
about what you want to do with your life and/or what you think you should do with
your life. Not easy questions.
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. List the attributes,
with the top and bottom of the range of each.
Judge the relative importance of attributes by distributing 100 points among those
attributes. Explain in detail how you made the judgments that yielded the attributes
weights. Give an example.
Construct a table of your analysis, with the options, attributes, attribute
utilities and weights. The weights should be the last row, at the bottom. Show
completely the calculation of the utility of the best option. If the outcome is a
close call, make some changes in the utilities and weights to see how easy it would
have been for another option to be in first place.
Discuss the results. Was the option that maximized your partner's utility consistent
with his or her intuition? What did your partner learn?
Last assignment (due last day of classes, Dec. 9, by end
of the day): 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.
Grading of this assignment:
If a paper does a good job summarizing the course, it is a B (8/12).
It must say something beyond the course to get an A (11/12). But it
must also consider obvious counter-arguments; failure to do that
could drag it down, even below B. If I'm blown away by the writing, I give a
higher grade, even A+ (12). If the writing is so incoherent that I
cannot understand the ideas, I lower the grade. If 2 or more big
problems are present (nothing original, one sided, badly written), the
paper can get a C (5) or D (2). F (0) is reserved for papers that have
nothing to do with the course, or are not submitted.
Last modified 12/12/11
