Human Behavior


How does researching human behavior tie into physics?
Human behavior can be viewed as a having many of the dyanmics of a complex system. Prof. Newman's research is based on decision-making; specifically the way we learn, assign risks, and forget certain things. Newman's research is not based on any one culture but generically on people as a whole. Anything more detailed in terms of understanding human behavior would be researched by someone from the social sciences.

The knowledge that comes from studying how humans assess risk can be applied to situations such as designing how "reliable" a power transmission system should be. Professor Newman co-authored a paper called "Understand the Effect of Risk Aversion on Risk" in 2005 that further discusses human behvaior research. The applications for understanding different behaviors are endless when you consider that every time a decision is made the pros and cons are weighed against one another and a "rating" is applied.



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