Cognitive Styles and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Format: Online
Student Group: High School and Undergraduate Stduents
Location: GEC Academy, Beijing, China
Course Objective
The aim of the course is to get you thinking about how you collect and process information as a decision-maker. The first session will invite you to think about your personal strengths and weaknesses as a decision-maker, before introducing you to the idea of cognitive styles and employing a questionnaire-based tool to identify your own dominant cognitive style. This will be followed by a discussion of how to incorporate the strengths of other cognitive style and how an awareness of other cognitive styles be useful in the workplace.
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We will introduce you to the standard model of decision-making under uncertainty and, particularly, the ideas of “unknown unknowns” and “Black Swans” in connection with the challenge of imagining possible futures.
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Session will concentrate on your ability to deal with incomplete and ambiguous information. Again, we will use a questionnaire-based tool to identify your attitude to ambiguity and consider the kind of environments that require a high tolerance of ambiguity. An explanation will be given of why we tend to suffer ambiguity and (unknown) unknown.
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Last, we will argue that while some unknown unknowns are uncoverable, others may well be, and that there are ways to improve our performance in uncovering them. You will be shown a recently developed method to help you create future scenarios, and which is designed to overcome the various cognitive biases that decision makers are often subject to.