Dr Yana Litovsky

This course is available on the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science. This course is not available as an outside option to students on other programmes.

Students must have completed the following three compulsory courses prior to taking this course: PB450E Behavioural Science and Policy, MG406E Behavioural Decision Science, and PB471E Research Methods for Behavioural Science. Students must also be taking PB413E Frontiers in Behavioural Science Methods concurrently.

We live in an age of unprecedented information abundance, yet easy access to information does not necessarily lead to superior knowledge, more informed beliefs, or better decisions. This course critically examines the psychological forces that determine how people seek and process information, how they use information to form knowledge and beliefs, and how they navigate environments rife with misinformation. The course covers five interconnected areas. (1) It begins by exploring the motivations behind information seeking and avoidance. (2) It then covers the cognitive constraints that limit what people process and retain, (3) followed by how information shapes beliefs formation and why people are susceptible to misinformation. (4) It then shifts to how organisations and platforms design information environments to exploit the reviewed tendencies and covers cognitive biases related to privacy and information disclosure. (5) It concludes by evaluating behavioural interventions aimed at improving how people engage with information and exploring a major emerging challenge in our relationship to information: generative AI. A central focus of the course is attention, perhaps our most scarce cognitive resource, which limits both the quality and quantity of the information people consume. The course explores how people systematically undervalue what their attention is worth and overestimate how much control they have over it, and how organisations and platforms capture that attention to influence how much and what kind of information we consume.  Drawing on psychology and behavioural economics, the course pairs theory with case studies that show how these dynamics play out in real-world information environments. As such, it is directly relevant to practitioners working in communications, public policy, health, or any domain in which outcomes depend on what people notice, believe, or ignore, and the summative assessment is designed to ensure that the course's insights are interpreted and applied across the diverse organisational, cultural, and geographic contexts that students bring with them. 

15 hours of lectures and 8 hours of seminars in the Spring break.

Memo in May.

• Sharot, T., & Sunstein, C. R. (2020). How people decide what they want to know. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(1), 14-19.
• Golman, R., Hagmann, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2017). Information avoidance. Journal of Economic Literature, 55(1), 96-135.
• Hsee, C. K., & Ruan, B. (2016). The Pandora effect: The power and peril of curiosity. Psychological science, 27(5), 659-666.
• Loewenstein, G., & Wojtowicz, Z. (2025). The economics of attention. Journal of Economic Literature, 63(3), 1038-1089.
• Hills, T. T. (2019). The dark side of information proliferation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 323-330.
• Fisher, M., Goddu, M. K., & Keil, F. C. (2015). Searching for explanations: How the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 144(3), 674. 
• Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498.
• Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). The psychology of fake news. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(5), 388-402.
• Norberg, P. A., Horne, D. R., & Horne, D. A. (2007). The privacy paradox: Personal information disclosure intentions versus behaviors. Journal of consumer affairs, 41(1), 100-126.
• Kidd, C., & Birhane, A. (2023). How AI can distort human beliefs. Science, 380(6651), 1222-1223.

Research paper (100%) in June.