Human Biases in Decision Making:
Avoiding the Traps


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What Degrades Your Decision Making?
The human mind isn’t wired to make high-quality decisions. Because of how our minds work, errors and pitfalls keep us from making decisions that add the most value. Understand how natural behavioral processes lead to biases, distortion, and mistakes. Explore preventive measures and techniques to reduce these biases, improve individual decisions and enrich organizational decision processes.
Benefits
- Understand the ways in which your mind, personality, and social structures can degrade your decision-making.
- Discover six categories of biases that produce most of the mistakes in decision making
- Discuss how overconfidence, confirmation bias and hindsight bias can keep us from seeking critical information and making realistic judgments
- Understand the limiting effects of unconscious self-serving biases in yourself and others
- Examine five types of associations we use to make judgments which can be misleading
- Recognize the distortions created by relative comparisons and simplification
- Anticipate how capacity on perception, attention, memory, reasoning and choice influence our decisions
- Balance conflict and cooperation to minimize the negative effects and increase the positive influences of group dynamics
- Develop a personal action plan for counteracting natural decision problems and reducing the impact of negative decision behaviors in your organization
Enrollment Options
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Group and Custom Enrollment
Enroll as a team, or customize this program for your organization.

Upcoming Sessions
Class Details
Strategic Decision and Risk Management
Date
10/24/22 - 10/25/22
2 Days
Instructors
Eric Bickel
Carl Spetzler
Raghunath Rao
Location
UT Campus
Human Biases in Decision Making: Avoiding the Traps |
Strategic Decision and Risk Management |
|
Date 10/24/22 - 10/25/22 2 Days |
Instructors Eric Bickel Carl Spetzler Raghunath Rao
|
Location UT Campus |
Class |
Concentration |
Date |
Location |
Instructors |
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Human Biases in Decision Making: Avoiding the Traps |
Strategic Decision and Risk Management |
10/24/22 - 10/25/22 2 Days |
UT Campus |
Eric Bickel Carl Spetzler Raghunath Rao
|
Great mix of presentation and activity to keep attention.

Who Should Attend?
The skills developed in all our Strategic Decision Making courses are applicable for a variety of professionals across verticals. Whether you work for a global corporation or a small business, we can help.
Specifically, these courses are tailor for those who:
- Want to make better decisions, especially when outcomes are uncertain and when risks include financial and non-financial impacts.
- Want to develop better processes for decision making within their team or across their organization.
There are no formal prerequisites for these classes but we recommend that those interested in the topic should start with our Decision Quality class to learn the fundamentals.
Why Take This Class?
Demonstrate Your Expertise with a Certificate

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Reimbursement Options
Learn more about course credits and options for course reimbursement. Get tips on the best way to approach your manager and download a customizable template to facilitate making the ask.

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Course Location
In person courses take place at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center and adjoining Rowling Hall on the UT campus in Austin. These world-class facilities provide a comfortable and convenient learning environment, with direct access to the 40 acres of campus and within walking distance of downtown Austin. Live online and on-demand course options are available for many courses.
In Partnership with Strategic Decisions Group
The Strategic Decision and Risk Management Certificate courses offered by Texas Executive Education combine The University of Texas at Austin’s academic and research depth with the decision and risk management expertise and track record of Strategic Decisions Group (SDG).
Strategic Decisions Group (SDG) is a global consulting firm with expertise in strategic decision making, risk management and shareholder value creation. SDG’s collaborative approach helps clients find innovative strategies for today while helping them build decision competency for the future.
Other Strategic Decision and Risk Management Courses
Decision and Risk Analysis
Explore the foundations of decision quality and how to use a rigorous analytic framework to make better decisions in your personal and professional life.
Decision Quality: Make the Right Choice Every Time
Learn how to frame strategic choices, generate alternatives, develop credible forecasts, quantify uncertainty and judge the quality of a decision at the time it is made.
Leading Strategic Decision Making
Achieve success by effectively diagnosing a decision situation, designing a clear approach, facilitating communication, and presenting compelling rationale to key stakeholders.
Modeling and Analytics for Strategic Insight
Create models that answer executives' questions, produce compelling analyses, and ultimately gain commitment.
Multiparty Decision Quality: Collaboration and Competition in Decision Making
Assemble concepts, tools, and skills for applying the DQ Framework in multi-party situations.
Scenarios and Forecasting: Planning for Uncertainty
Improve strategic decision-making with enhanced forecasting methods and by leveraging scenarios to foster insight.
Resources
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Break Free From These 3 Workplace Biases
Although implicit biases are not something we often think about, they do shape every decision we make. Discover how to escape 3 types of biases that affect workplace decision making. -
5 Signs Your Team is Falling Prey to Conformity Bias
Observing instances of conformity bias will help you mitigate its detrimental effects on your team. -
How Biases Sabotage Your Best Decisions
The human intellect is extremely powerful and capable. But our minds have evolved with biases that work against good judgment and decision-making.
