The Social Psychology of Behavior in Organizations

Understanding others’ thoughts and behaviors is essential for professional and personal success. We all do our best to understand our co-workers and significant others on a daily. Most of us do so by putting on the cap of an “intuitive scientist.” In other words, most of us rely on our intuitions to identify others’ thoughts and motivations and to predict others’ behavior.

Unfortunately, decades of psychological research suggest that our intuitions are often misguided in systematic ways. This course will enable you to have a more accurate understanding of others’ motivations, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. In short, this course will teach you to think like a “psychological scientist” rather than an intuitive scientist, and give you an understanding of when your intuitions about others are likely to be reliable and when they are not.

This understanding is important to have because managing other people—be they competitors, customers, or co-workers—is critical for professional as well as personal success. At the start of your professional career, success may have required simply having the necessary technical expertise to produce excellent work product for your organization. As you progress in your career, however, success will increasingly require you to manage groups of people, to align their skills, solve interpersonal problems, and create well-functioning teams. This course is intended to provide the scientific knowledge of human thought and behavior that is critical for successfully managing others, and also for successfully managing yourself.