part 1 (200 words)

For this task, please post chapter notes for ONE out of the two chapters you’ve been given three weeks to read, Chapter 9 (Helping & Altruism) or Chapter 10 (Aggression).

I can only hope that you’ve already made notes on these chapters since you realize that the first step towards true understanding of what you read is to organize and actively process it with good notes. Yes, I hope you did it even if you weren’t going to be tested on it! 🙂

Please make sure to take good notes and that they aren’t too scanty if you want to get credit for this post.

Okay, that’s it for this task. If you’d like to respond to someone else, you might want to highlight something you liked in their approach to taking notes or maybe share something you do in studying that particularly helps you

part 2 (200 words)

For this task, as a conclusion to our scientific exploration of social psychology, you will be putting on your “researcher hats” and conducting a helping experiment. To simplify things, let’s all agree that we only need a minimum of 8 participants/subjects, 4 in each condition. These participants can be strangers or people you know.

You need to think of a hypothesis that is related to helping. Come up with at least ONE independent variable that you believe will be related to helping. Figure out what helping behavior you are going to study. The best way to do this is to base your hypothesis and variables on research/theory/concepts in the book. If you have someone who can help you, you can even have a confederate who helps you do something different in two groups. If it’s difficult to do this experiment in person, if you set it up well, you can even conduct it online with your friends and family.

Please do not complicate things too much. You can select a simple variable that you think will affect helping. It can be anything — something about people, something you manipulate, something about the situation – that you believe will be related to helping behaviors.

Needless to say, please select a helping situation that doesn’t freak people out! 🙂 If in doubt, feel free to run it by me.

Come back here and post a write-up of the methodology and findings from your study. Clearly:

(1) Identify the hypothesis and psychological reasoning behind it

(2) State the Independent and Dependent variables

(3) Describe participants and the helping situation

(4) Describe the results

(5) Discuss your study and findings. Were there any flaws? What conclusions do you draw? What are the implications of your findings?

Really looking forward to this! 🙂 Note: your grade will depend on the QUALITY of your study, on the thought given, on the execution, and on the depth of your discussion; it doesn’t matter if you get the results you were expecting.

(part 3 200 words)

Please go to the following website: http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow/aggression.htm

Under the heading of “VIDEO” choose at least THIRTY minutes worth of videos to watch and briefly summarize them (better for you to choose a few short ones rather than one long one).

For your post, note down EACH video you viewed and for EACH:

1. Write the url

2. The length (in minutes) of the video

3. Brief summary and your reaction to the content

4. Analyzing and applying various social psychological concepts(this should be a large part of the write-up)

Hoping that you’ll find these interesting since you had a choice in what you watched. Looking forward to your commentary and insight!