Course Catalog

This class will explore some of the most famous disasters through the lens of human decision-making errors. It will take an interdisciplinary approach that includes social psychology, communication, and management as we examine some of the most interesting case studies. The class will explore scenarios where: leaders and managers must solve significant problems; humans have made critical errors, the role of the individual is vital in solving these problems in various settings, recommendations need to be made so as to learn from these scenarios and stories. These case studies will explore a variety of applied theoretical areas: resilience in decision making (for example – leadership in the face of extreme crisis), cultural problems (for example – accidents caused by issues in different cultural scenarios), cognitive biases (for example – disasters caused by the unchecked biases that cause human error and prevent robust decision making ), and understanding how individuals interact (for example – how humans work and communicate in groups and how several aviation accidents have been caused by not understanding group dynamics), to name a few.