INFLUENCE: BEHAVORIAL SCIENCE & COMMUNIC

 This course places students at the intersection of two converging fields – behavioral science and communication – to teach them how our predictable irrationality can become a competitive advantage in persuading people, groups, and organizations to take favorable actions. Through lectures, case analysis, and group projects, students learn and apply a variety of psychology principles to communication thinking, planning, and leadership. Students are challenged to think broadly about communication – advertising, PR, social media, content, and internal communication – in their application of cognitive bias and heuristics principles including anchoring, framing, loss aversion, and choice architecture. Students obtain a strong grounding that influence involves four core elements: decision-making, nudges, cognitive biases, and noise reduction.