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Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 1.5 hours / session

Recitations: 1 session / week, 1.5 hours / session

Goals

This class combines a few different goals: develop a critical eye for making inferences from data; be able to carry out simple data analysis; learn about managerial psychology; develop interesting new questions about managerial psychology and test these questions.

General Requirements

  • Be prepared for every class
  • Submit your assignments on time (sorry, this is a large class and there will be no exceptions, so plan accordingly)
  • Do well on the midterm and final exam
  • (15.301 only) Conduct an independent research and submit related proposal and papers
  • (15.310 only) Develop a business proposal based on managerial psychological concepts
  • Participate in 3 hours of experiments (out of class), or submit three short papers (5 pages each) analyzing a research stream of your choice in managerial psychology (get approval from your TA prior to writing the paper)

Note: This is a large class. As a consequence, we ask you to ponder before you send us an email. If you have a question, please start by looking at the class's Web site on server. If you don't find an answer, ask your friends, next your TA, and only as a last resort, ask Professor Ariely.

Grades

For 15.301: Undergraduate Section

ACTIVITIES PERCENTAGES
Midterm 20%
Final Exam 20%
Group Problem Set 10%
Individual Project (15% for the writing; 25% for the project) 40%
Oral Presentation in Section 10%

Coming to class, and reading the material will help you get a better grade in Midterm and Final Exam.

For 15.310: Graduate Section

ACTIVITIES PERCENTAGES
Midterm 20%
Final Exam 20%
Individual Business Proposal 40%
Oral Presentation in Section 20%

Midterm and Final Exam exclude material on T-tests and ANOVA; Coming to class, and reading the material will help you get a better grade.

15.301 Individual Project

For this class, you are required to conduct an independent research project, involving the preparation of the research proposal, research design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation, and report writing. In addition, you will be asked to give a short 5-minute presentation of your research findings in your respective sections. Your research question can be based on any of the concepts covered in class, or any areas in managerial psychology you find interesting and important (discuss with your TA prior to writing the proposal). All projects have to be approved by the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) at MIT before you can begin data collection. More details on COUHES applications will be provided later.

15.310 Individual Business Proposal

For this class, you are required to prepare an individual business proposal of either a new product/service or improvements to an existing product/service. The subject of your proposal can be based on any of the concepts covered in class, or any areas in managerial psychology you find interesting and important (discuss with your TA prior to writing the proposal). In addition, you will be asked to give a 20-minute presentation of your business idea in your section.

Textbooks (Note that you are responsible for all material in the following three textbooks)

Course Reader

Amazon logo Moore, David S. The Basic Practice of Statistics. 3rd ed. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1995. ISBN: 0716726289.
(Online Statistics Reference: Hopkins, Will G. A New View of Statistics.)

Amazon logo Gilovich, Thomas. How We Know What Isn't So. New York: Free Press, 1993. ISBN: 0029117062.
(Read Chapters 1-7 before the Midterm, and the whole book before the Final Exam.)