Webinar: Judgment and Decision-Making in Dam Engineering

Dam engineering is about dams, but is done by and for people. As a result, in order to achieve dam safety, we need to understand not just dams, but also the people (including ourselves) involved in designing, constructing, operating, maintaining, and benefitting from them. Social scientists have been studying people scientifically for more than a century, and we are now at a point historically where the social sciences have generated valuable insights into human thought and behavior.

The aim of this webinar is to describe key socio-psychological insights and apply them to the practice of dam engineering, with an emphasis on judgment and decision-making. We will find that judgment and decision-making are influenced by aspects such as subconscious and conscious cognition, perception, attention, memory, modes of reasoning, self-concept, use of heuristics, cognitive biases, emotions, group influences and interactions, and culture, all of which contribute to both human capability and human fallibility.

This webinar will explore all of these aspects, will illustrate them with numerous examples from dam engineering practice, and will conclude with evidence-based suggestions for how we can improve our judgment and decision-making at both individual and group levels.

Five Learning Objectives of This Course:

• Models of the human mind, in a social context
• Individual judgment and decision-making
• Group judgment and decision-making
• Ways to improve individual judgment and decision-making
• Ways to improve group judgment and decision-making