Chapter . Critical Learning Exercises - The Revealing Science of Social Psychology

Students’ responses should illustrate how their reaction to a recent significant event was shaped by one of the five perspectives. In doing this, students may describe how they reacted instinctually based on human evolution (evolutionary perspective); how their behavior was influenced by their perception, memory, or interpretation of events, individuals, or themselves (social cognitive perspective); how their behavior was influenced by their culture (cultural perspective); how their behavior was driven by their quest to know more about their existence and human nature (existential perspective); or how their behavior was influenced by neural processes (neuroscience perspective).

Students’ responses will vary based on their individual experiences of learning that science disconfirmed something they assumed to be true. Students may describe sticking with their original beliefs, thus ignoring the scientific evidence due to confirmation bias, or changing their beliefs.

Possible experiments vary, but it must be clear that students understand the elements of a study, such as identifying the independent variable as what is being manipulated (violent video content) and the dependent variables as what is being measured (aggression). How students operationally define these variables will vary, but it should be evident that this is an experiment that includes random assignment of participants to the various levels of the independent variable, and students propose a method for reducing confounds in the study. An example of a possible study would be to assign participants to one of two conditions—one that watches a nonviolent video (the control group) and one that watches the violent video (the experimental group). Aggression may be measured by how the individuals react when left in the room alone for a period of time after watching the video to wait for the experimenter to return to release them from the study. Their behaviors in the room could be observed and measured (e.g., number of times they pound on the locked door, etc.). Confounds that would need to be reduced include when the study occurs during the day, previous exposure to violent video games, age, and so on. These could be standardized or assessed to reduce their impact on the study.

It is important to study populations outside of university students living in the Western world to increase the generalizability of results or the external validity of the study’s findings. In addition, this would help us learn more about how culture and society impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which helps us better understand our similarities and differences. Students’ suggestions for questions they would like to examine will vary, but should include the question itself, where they would like to study the question and why, as well as two places they would use for comparisons.