The individual paper involves analyzing a flawed decision made by you or others in organizational life using the concepts and theories we learn in our course on behavioral science. Specifically, this paper requires that you choose and analyze an event from your career that you now believe may have involved flawed decision making by you, or others in your organization or industry. You may consider a decision that, among other things, attributed causation to a correlational relationship (e.g., an instance of product display reconfiguration claimed to increase revenues), a decision that involved cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias), and/or a decision that invoked conversations about fairness (e.g., a policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic).
Then, address the following:
1. Describe the event and provide context to the decision in question.
2. Identify the flaws that you believe were involved in the decision.
3. Explain the reasoning and/or evidence that now leads you to suspect the decision was flawed.
4. Propose what you would have done differently to produce a better decision at the time.
5. Explain how and why you believe your proposed approach might have improved the decision in question.
In developing your individual paper, you will essentially use an event from your career as case material to explicitly highlight your knowledge of and ability to apply the concepts and theories from this course to analyze a potentially flawed decision and offer solutions.
The choice about the relative weight to put on different issues, ideas, concepts, and theories in reflecting on the decision in question is yours. In evaluating your paper, I will look to see whether the concepts and theories you use are described accurately (i.e. substantively correct), applied appropriately (i.e. fit the context you describe), and most relevant to the situation (i.e. did you pick the theories and concepts that best illuminate the situation).
Here are some additional tips you may consider in developing your paper:
1. Applying more theories is generally better than applying fewer theories. There are, however, two caveats: you need enough rich descriptive material about your chosen issue, and you need to cover each theory or concept thoroughly enough that convinces the audience that you know how to apply it. Theories that are covered superficially will not receive much credit.
2. Notice that this paper must be graded. It is easy to get carried away with an interesting issue and forget that this is also a way to test your knowledge of and ability to apply the course material.
3. Remember to explicitly mention and engage course concepts and theories. Drawing explicit links between the concepts you identify and the paper material is important.
4. It may be useful to develop a comparative angle in the project. For example, you may compare the organization’s performance before and after the decision in question.
5. When facing a choice as to whether to narrow your paper to a more focused topic, balance the benefits of this strategy in terms of richness, thoroughness and completeness with the costs of reduced data availability. Choose the narrowest possible issue that offers sufficient data and allows you to describe and integrate a discussion on behavioral science.
Some theories might be helpful for the essay:
Prospect Theory; Psychological Bias; Defining the scale in performance ratings ( Noise chapter 23); Debiasing and Decision Hygiene (Noise, Chapter 19)Heuristics and Biases; Fairness and Cooperation; Social Norms and Intertemporal Choice; Want /should conflict and commitment devices; Mental accounting and Goal setting; Cognitive Dissonance, confirmation Bias, and Escalation of Commitment; Bounded awareness; Influencing decisions; Follow-through and behavior change.
Use the concepts from the Books below for the essay:
Thaler, R.H. & Sunstein C.R. (2021) Nudge.
Kahneman, D. Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein (2021) Noise.
Cialdini, R.(2021) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Collins Publishing: New York.
Career experience:
I work as an accounting analyst as a team lead for State of California department. I get this position as a promotion in my career. My supervisor also new to our department. I had a one-year probation period. They sent a student assistant to train me, student assistant’s position is a lot lower than my current position. They didn’t have the same knowledge as the higher position like me. My supervisor sometimes had no patient when she answered my questions. The first probation report was very bad. My supervisor tried to dismiss me. I disagree and submit the rebuttal letter. At the same time, I asked for help from the Union. Because I felt unfair in my career. My supervisor treated me unfairly. At the beginning, my supervisor tried to document all my mistakes, she did not provide my second and third probation reports. but I improved myself and passed my probation finally.
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