COHR 302 - Critical Evaluation of Information, Evidence, and Arguments

This course will provide you with the skills and abilities to interpret and critically evaluate what you perceive, the arguments you consider, and the information you receive. As a future working professional or manager, you will be frequently bombarded with data, facts, arguments, and ‘research findings’ about effective management practices, techniques, and folklore. Those sources of facts, findings and myths come from all kinds of places, such as personal experience and learned stories, articles in the news and trade journals, professional workshops, and consultants. Unfortunately, only some of this information will be accurate and useful to you. More often than not, this information will be misleading or even possibly harmful. This course will teach you how to weed out the useless, biased, or misleading information from that which is important and relevant to your goals and success as a manager. In this course, we will examine inherent biases in human decision making, common tricks and mistakes of logic, the nature of cause and effect relationships, and how to know which information to trust and which to avoid.

Learning objectives

As a result of taking this course, you will be able to:

• be more aware of, and potentially able to overcome, common errors in our own and others’ perceptions, logic, and biases in decision making.
• understand the concept of cause and effect and distinguish it from junk science.
• critically evaluate “research findings” and “facts” that appear in the popular press or trade journals.
• be able to determine the usefulness of arguments, opinions, and evidence for application to those in your organization.
• be a more savvy consumer of news and media reports.

Note: COHR 302 will not be offered in 2023W.

Prerequisite: All of COMM 191 (formerly numbered as COMM 291), COMM 203.