
Cognitive and Social Psychology - PMO
Start date
7 oktober 2026
Duration
3 days
Language
Dutch
Costs
€ 3900
Modular
Schedule
Online kick-off and 3 on-campus days
Introduction
Decisions drag on, meetings get bogged down in opinions, and in hybrid discussions, the loudest voice too often wins. Bias, noise, and peer pressure creep into your process, resulting in unclear criteria, half-hearted choices, and energy loss in teams.
This module gives you insight into how people think and react: you learn to understand attention, memory, and decision-making, read group dynamics, and identify and reduce thinking errors early on. This allows you to sharpen your communication, make social dynamics productive, and help your teams reach clear, supported decisions more quickly, even under time pressure or in crisis situations. This module can be taken separately within the Advanced Program in Human and Organizational Psychology.
Participant profile
For professionals who want to demonstrably improve decision-making, communication, and collaboration; from management teams and project teams to crisis teams and hybrid meetings. You recognize delayed decisions, noise, hierarchy bias, or groupthink, and are looking for guidance on how to change that.
You want to be able to identify errors in thinking, make social dynamics productive, and increase the quality and speed of decisions with clear criteria, roles, and simple team rituals. You expect evidence-based tools that you can apply directly in your practice.

Why this program
What makes this program unique?
- From insight to decision quality: you translate attention, memory, and heuristics into clear decision-making frameworks and team rituals that reduce noise.
- Bias recognized and mitigated: you learn to identify and reduce prejudice, tunnel vision, and groupthink early on using evidence-based techniques.
- Cognitive × social × organizational: integration of individual processes and group dynamics in realistic work situations.
- Cross-sector case studies: cases from the business world and public domain, applicable to your reality.
- Small-scale, interactive, top lecturers: peer review, critical dialogue, and faculty that connect science and practice.
What will the program bring you?
Better decision-making through knowledge of attention, memory, and heuristics.
Recognizing and reducing cognitive biases and groupthink in teams.
Communicate and collaborate more effectively in (hybrid) groups.
Applying psychological models to organizational interventions with measurable effects.
About this program
From cognitive biases and peer pressure to sharper decisions and better collaboration
In this module, you will examine how cognitive processes and social forces together determine what happens in organizations. You will explore how attention, memory, and heuristics (rules of thumb) guide choices, and how groups exert influence through norms, roles, and (informal) power.
You will learn to recognize bias and noise before they undermine decision-making, and you will practice ways to organize consultation and collaboration more intelligently - so that it is not the loudest voice that wins, but the best argument. This is relevant for management team and project meetings, crisis teams, and hybrid settings where speed and quality are important.
- You will learn to recognize the mechanisms behind attention, memory, and decision-making and translate them into better choices.
- You will identify thinking errors and groupthink early on and reduce them with simple, workable agreements and checks.
- You will apply psychological models to systematically analyze behavior and interactions and make targeted adjustments.
Module structure
This module begins with an online kick-off session, followed by three consecutive days of classes on location.
Part of the Advanced Program Psychology of People and Organizations
This module can be taken separately or as part of the Advanced Program Psychology of People and Organizations (PMO). The Advanced Program offers a compact, practice-oriented framework for translating psychological insights into better collaboration, decision-making, and change.
You will learn to recognize patterns based on experience, examine your own contribution, and apply substantiated interventions to your own case.
The program was developed in close collaboration with Tilburg University and is aimed at professionals who drive or guide change (managers, project and change managers, HR, public/non-profit).
Other modules from the Advanced Program in Psychology of People and Organizations are:
PMO 1 - Future of People, Organizations, and Society
PMO 2 - Psychology in Organizational Change
PMO 3 - Psychology in Marketing and Consumer Behavior
PMO 4 - Cognitive and Social Psychology
PMO 5 - Emotion and Differential Psychology
Read more about the Advanced Program Psychology of People and Organizations.
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