Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions, and How to Make Better Ones

About This Course

Smart people make bad decisions every day.

Not because they are unintelligent, careless, or uninformed, but because good judgment requires more than simply being smart or knowing a lot.

Our brains are remarkably good at making quick decisions, recognizing patterns, filling in missing information, and helping us function without having to carefully analyze every choice we make. Most of the time, that works extremely well.

Sometimes it does not.

And sometimes we simply want something to be true badly enough that our reasoning quietly begins helping us defend it.

The Art of Good Judgment is a fast-moving, research-based three-hour course exploring why otherwise intelligent people make poor decisions and, more importantly, what we can actually do about it.

This is not a class about memorizing dozens of cognitive biases or learning psychological trivia.

Instead, we will examine the mental shortcuts, emotional states, motivations, and decision traps that influence everyday judgment, then build practical ways to recognize when our own thinking deserves a second look.

Students will explore the difference between intelligence, knowledge, judgment, and wisdom, including why being knowledgeable or even generally wise does not make someone immune from making a bad decision.

Through real-world examples, short exercises, discussion, and psychological research, students will learn how to evaluate information more carefully, recognize when emotion or ego may be influencing a conclusion, make better decisions when information is incomplete, and become more comfortable acting without pretending to have certainty they simply do not have.

The goal is not to teach you how to always be right.

That is impossible.

The goal is to help you become wrong less often, recognize mistakes sooner, and make decisions that are easier to defend when you look back and ask:

“Based on what I knew at the time, did I make the best judgment I reasonably could?”

Topics Covered

The difference between intelligence, knowledge, judgment, and wisdom, and why being smart does not guarantee good decisions

How mental shortcuts such as anchoring, availability, framing, and base rates influence what feels true or reasonable

How ego, motivated reasoning, sunk costs, and the desire to be right can quietly change how we evaluate evidence

How anger, fear, stress, fatigue, urgency, and other temporary states can change the person making the decision

How to make decisions when information is incomplete, probabilities are uncertain, and there may be no obviously correct answer

Practical tools for improving judgment, including considering the opposite, premortems, outside views, decision rules, feedback, and after-action review

Equipment Required

An open and curious mindset

Pen and paper

A willingness to occasionally discover that your brain just fooled you

Prerequisites

None

Course Notes

This is a classroom-based course designed for everyday adults who want to better understand how they make decisions and how those decisions can be improved.

No previous study of psychology, philosophy, statistics, or decision science is required.

The course is grounded in established research from psychology, behavioral economics, and decision science. Where research is uncertain, disputed, or more complicated than popular psychology sometimes suggests, we will discuss those limitations as well.

Price:

$25