Practical: Group Decisions

Full course description

Decisions are omnipresent in our lives, and many of the most crucial decisions are made in groups. Medical teams diagnose patients’ illnesses, emergency teams decide on the best approach to deal with an incident, and management teams make important investment decisions. Each member of a decision making group often contributes specific information and has his or her own perspective on the decision problem. In this project students will experience the challenges and hindrances of decision making when members have diverse information and to scientifically investigate factors that contribute towards successful group decision making. The practical consists of two parts: 1) a group decision making exercise and 2) a short report including analyses of the data gathered during these exercises. During the exercise, students will play the role of a fire brigade commander, police officer, or environmental expert and make decisions as a member of an emergency management team. During this session, data will be collected on a number of group variables (e.g. leadership, personality, communication). After all students have participated, they will receive an anonymous version of the dataset containing data on all teams. In small groups, the students will conduct statistical analyses on this data and write a short report.

The final assessment for this course is pass or fail - and not a numerical grade between 0,0 and 10,0.