Topic guide · Reasoning and decisions / Social and cultural behaviour
What changes when decisions depend on other people?
Make a small strategic model explicit, then separate best responses, equilibrium and desirable outcomes.
Topic guide · Consciousness and philosophy / Reasoning and decisions / Methods, evidence and reproducibility
Do brain recordings show that free will is an illusion?
Analyse the gap between an experimental task, a neural prediction and a philosophical conclusion about control.
Topic guide · Methods, evidence and reproducibility / Reasoning and decisions
When can a study support a causal explanation?
Separate an observed relationship from a specified intervention contrast and inspect the assumptions connecting them.
Topic guide · Reasoning and decisions / Learning, memory and education
Why do intentions lose to habits or procrastination?
Compare philosophical, learning and time-preference accounts without turning an explanatory model into a moral diagnosis or a treatment claim.
Topic guide · Reasoning and decisions / Methods, evidence and reproducibility
How should we reason with uncertain information?
Build a probability model, condition on information and expose independence assumptions before comparing formal rules with human judgements.
Topic guide · Reasoning and decisions / Methods, evidence and reproducibility
When are choices biased, and what is the comparison standard?
Specify the information, goal and comparison rule before interpreting a response as a judgement bias.
Lectures and explanations
Selections below prioritise source-checked annotations. Inclusion does not assess scientific correctness.
MIT OpenCourseWare · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 3: Independence
Distinguishes independence of two events, independence of a collection and pairwise independence.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 3 - Parts of the Soul I
Compares several historical and modern ways of dividing motives or mental processes, including accounts associated with Plato, Hume, Freud and Haidt.
World Science U · Source-checked annotation
Decision-Making in the Real World
Alfred Mele distinguishes arbitrary laboratory actions from choices made after sustained deliberation.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 12 - Evolutionary Stability: Social Convention, Aggression, and Cycles
Applies evolutionary stability to conventions and Hawk–Dove games, then considers a setting without an evolutionarily stable population.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 13 - Sequential Games: Moral Hazard, Incentives, and Hungry Lions
Introduces sequential decisions and backward induction through lending, incentives and commitment examples.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 20 - The Prisoner's Dilemma
Examines the prisoners’ dilemma and the commons as cases where individually attractive choices can produce a collectively worse result.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 6 - Nash Equilibrium: Dating and Cournot
Applies Nash equilibrium to a coordination game and to Cournot competition, discussing collusion and the consequences of different market arrangements.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 10 - Mixed Strategies in Baseball, Dating and Paying Your Taxes
Distinguishes three interpretations of mixed strategies: actual randomisation, uncertainty about a player and proportions of a population using different actions.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 5 - Nash Equilibrium: Bad Fashion and Bank Runs
Defines Nash equilibrium and uses an investment game to examine coordination, multiple equilibria and undesirable collective outcomes.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 14 - Backward Induction: Commitment, Spies, and First-Mover Advantages
Applies backward induction to sequential quantity competition and examines how commitment and information affect apparent first-mover advantages.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 10 - Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Evolution and Rationality
Introduces an evolutionary perspective on psychology and discusses how evolutionary arguments are used to constrain explanations of behaviour and choice.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 15 - Backward Induction: Chess, Strategies, and Credible Threats
Discusses solutions to finite perfect-information games, defines strategies in sequential games and examines equilibrium threats that may not be credible.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 10 - Virtue and Habit II
Continues Aristotle’s account of virtue, discusses pleasure and flow, and introduces a situationist challenge to stable character.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 18 - Imperfect Information: Information Sets and Sub-Game Perfection
Uses information sets to represent what players cannot distinguish, then introduces subgame perfection for games with sequential and simultaneous components.
MIT OpenCourseWare · Source-checked annotation
18. Recurrent Networks
Introduces mathematical descriptions of recurrent networks in relation to memory storage and decision-making.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 11 - Evolutionary Stability: Cooperation, Mutation, and Equilibrium
Introduces evolutionary stability and relates it to domination and Nash equilibrium. Yale flags a notation error in the informal argument and supplies a correction in the accompanying notes.