Course Offerings

This course starts by discussing broad landscape of epistemological and theoretical perspectives and styles of reasoning and by situating in it quantitative research. It introduces you to the foundational concepts in quantitative research methods, such as causality, conceptualization, operationalization, measurement and sampling. It presents experimental design, survey design, and basic descriptive and inferential (frequentist) statistics, as well as a brief introduction to Bayesian inference and statistics.

Deception is a fundamental feature of human interaction, and contemporary technologies have reshaped how it is produced, spread, and detected. This course examines that shift. We begin by reviewing theories and concepts from psychology and interpersonal communication (e.g., Truth-Default Theory) on how deception works and how people decide what and whom to trust. We then turn to how the affordances of contemporary technologies alter or sustain these dynamics, drawing on cases such as scams, manipulated media, and deceptive online self-presentation. Throughout, the course considers populations that may be especially vulnerable and what can be done to build resilience. Students apply these concepts through in-depth case studies in class and complete an original case study of a form of technologically mediated deception in a domain of their interest.