• Provides the tools for thinking through the tension of empirical work that suggests humans are surprisingly irrational and other work that suggests humans are exquisitely rational. Doing so requires combining both normative and descriptive methods: the need to know how ideally rational agents <em>would</em> reason, as well as how real people <em>do</em> reason. The first half of the term is spent learning the details of how to work with the canonical (Bayesian) theory of rationality; it is blackboard- and problem-set based. The second half of the term is spent applying this theory to work out the proper interpretation of a variety of empirical results that have been taken to demonstrate human irrationality, such as hindsight bias, motivated reasoning, the gambler's fallacy, the sunk-cost fallacy, conformity, and polarization. Subject is paper- and discussion-based. Enrollment may be limited; preference to Course 24 majors and minors.

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