Cognitive Bias in Decision Making

Decision-making is a critical skill in project management, yet highly capable project managers and teams routinely make poor decisions due to reliance on faulty lenses for perceiving information, assessing risks and probabilities, evaluating alternatives, and anticipating consequences. This seven-week in-person elective examines how cognitive biases, heuristics, and other psychological influences can shape decision-making in a project management context. Students will explore foundational concepts from behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and decision science such as bounded rationality, confirmation bias, anchoring, availability, overconfidence, the planning fallacy, and the sunk cost fallacy and consider how these can influence decisions throughout the project lifecycle. The course will also critically examine the limitations of cognitive bias theory, and it will introduce the skillful uses of heuristics in project management through concepts such as ecological rationality and the adaptive toolbox. The course is designed for project practitioners at all levels. Cross-registrants are welcome if they work in project management.