Decision Science for Environmental Threats

Decision science is the study of how people make decisions. It aims to describe these processes in ways that will help people make better or more well-informed decisions. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws upon psychology, economics, political science, and management, among other disciplines. It is being used in a number of domain areas and for a variety of applications, including managing freshwater resources, designing decision support tools to aid in coastal adaptation to sea-level rise, and creating "nudges" to enhance energy efficiency behaviors. This course covers behavioral theories of probabilistic inference, intuitive prediction, preference, and decision making. Topics include heuristics and biases, risk perceptions and attitudes, strategies for combining different sources of information and dealing with conflicting objectives, and the roles of group and emotional processes in decision making. This course will introduce students to foundational theories of decision science, and will involve applying these theories to understand decisions about environmental threats.