What kinds of exercises you use to teach a skill like “checking consequentialism” should probably be placed in the greater context of a rationality curriculum. You have to know where the students are coming from at each step.
That said—making the assumption that the students are already familiar with the theory of heuristics and biases, and just need to learn how to apply them—I think most of these can be taught with similar kinds of hypotheticals and problems.
For checking consequentialism, you might want to focus on problems involving sunk costs. To illustrate how sunk costs can affect how someone automatically approaches a problem, split students up into groups (they will probably produce worse results as a group, which is good for this part) and give them all similar problems, with the initial conditions modified slightly. Example: “John has been working on his PhD for X years, and expects to finish in Y. He knows W and Z facts about how his degree will benefit him.” Modify parts of the problem, X and Y especially, to try and prime their System 1 for a different result. Have them make a decision quickly. Reconvene, discuss the problem, point out the issues with sunk costs and why the groups did or didn’t reach a different result.
This is just a starting activity; it could be followed by having students do more hypotheticals individually. The instructor needs to give a lot of feedback on the problems as they go, asking students key questions that they might not have thought of, so they’d ideally be well trained in a) rationality and b) drawing out student thinking.
Ideally the exercises wouldn’t require too much instructor skill, though, so I’ll think about this some more.
What kinds of exercises you use to teach a skill like “checking consequentialism” should probably be placed in the greater context of a rationality curriculum. You have to know where the students are coming from at each step.
That said—making the assumption that the students are already familiar with the theory of heuristics and biases, and just need to learn how to apply them—I think most of these can be taught with similar kinds of hypotheticals and problems.
For checking consequentialism, you might want to focus on problems involving sunk costs. To illustrate how sunk costs can affect how someone automatically approaches a problem, split students up into groups (they will probably produce worse results as a group, which is good for this part) and give them all similar problems, with the initial conditions modified slightly. Example: “John has been working on his PhD for X years, and expects to finish in Y. He knows W and Z facts about how his degree will benefit him.” Modify parts of the problem, X and Y especially, to try and prime their System 1 for a different result. Have them make a decision quickly. Reconvene, discuss the problem, point out the issues with sunk costs and why the groups did or didn’t reach a different result.
This is just a starting activity; it could be followed by having students do more hypotheticals individually. The instructor needs to give a lot of feedback on the problems as they go, asking students key questions that they might not have thought of, so they’d ideally be well trained in a) rationality and b) drawing out student thinking.
Ideally the exercises wouldn’t require too much instructor skill, though, so I’ll think about this some more.