Netflix has made ten of their documentaries available on their YouTube channel. For many years, Netflix has allowed teachers to screen documentaries in their classrooms. However, this isn’t possible with schools closed. So at their request, we have made a selection of our documentary features and series available on the Netflix US YouTube channel.  Of particular interest to psychology instructors is the 5-episode documentary Babies. The episodes average 50 minutes in length. Netflix provides you with a few discussion questions for each episode. Even if you don’t use them, they’ll give you a better sense of what the episodes cover. Love Video Link : 2619 Crawling Video Link : 2620 First Words Video Link : 2621 Sleep Video Link : 2622 First steps Video Link : 2623 Another documentary of interest, Period. End of Sentence (27 mins) opens with a young woman talking about having to drop out of school because she didn’t have access to menstrual products. When the local women start manufacturing pads, it becomes an important source of income, and, presumably, a source of independence, both for the women who are earning money and the women who are using the pads. After covering adolescence, this documentary could be an interesting discussion starter for what most of your students probably take for granted. If you’d like, you can expand discussion on whether menstrual products should be taxed or should be provided by schools.   Video Link : 2624 Knock Down the House (87 mins) follows four women who ran campaigns against incumbents in the 2018 mid-term elections. There may be some good content here for social psychology or political psychology. Video Link : 2625 Take a look at the titles and descriptions of the other documentaries Netflix has made available via YouTube. Be aware that the links on that page go to Netflix, not their YouTube channel.  ... View more

During this please-stay-away-from-other-people time, I have been thinking a lot about people who are trapped at home with an abuser. Yesterday morning we went to the grocery store for our next two-week round of supplies. No, we didn’t buy toilet paper. We had just happened to stock up before COVID-19, and we are still well-supplied. We were in the snacks aisle, when I realized that I had passed the sour cream and onion potato chips. I turned around to retrieve them, when a large man substantially farther away than the recommended six feet said, “So you’re coming this way then?!” I replied, pointing behind me, “Oh, you want to go this way?” “Not anymore!!” With that, he and the woman who was with him turned around and went down another aisle. Later, as I exited the frozen food aisle, he and she were about to pass that aisle. He spotted me, came up short, glared at me, huffed, and made a wide swing around me. Clearly, the grocery store was to be his and his alone that morning, and I had ruined his plan.   I have been having a hard time shaking the memory of these interactions. It’s the woman who was with him that I keep seeing. She was small, both in size and demeanor. She said nothing and was expressionless. She stood at his elbow and when he moved, she moved.   Now, I admittedly have no idea what the nature of their relationship is, but my he’s-abusive alarms were ringing loudly. And there was nothing I could do about it. At my college, I’m part of the team that helped our faculty move their winter quarter classes online for the end of the quarter. We’ve spent the last week helping our faculty get geared up to spend all of spring quarter online. While my focus has been on our faculty working from home, I’ve had to dedicate some time to thinking about my own spring quarter class and the students who will be in it. And now I can’t help but think about everyone’s living situation. How many of our college’s faculty and staff are trapped at home 24/7 with an abuser? How many of our students? How many of your faculty, staff, and students? The National Domestic Violence Hotline (2020) reports Here’s how COVID-19 could uniquely impact intimate partner violence survivors: Abusive partners may withhold necessary items, such as hand sanitizer or disinfectants. Abusive partners may share misinformation about the pandemic to control or frighten survivors, or to prevent them from seeking appropriate medical attention if they have symptoms. Abusive partners may withhold insurance cards, threaten to cancel insurance, or prevent survivors from seeking medical attention if they need it. Programs that serve survivors may be significantly impacted –- shelters may be full or may even stop intakes altogether. Survivors may also fear entering shelter because of being in close quarters with groups of people. Survivors who are older or have chronic heart or lung conditions may be at increased risk in public places where they would typically get support, like shelters, counseling centers, or courthouses. Travel restrictions may impact a survivor’s escape or safety plan – it may not be safe for them to use public transportation or to fly. An abusive partner may feel more justified and escalate their isolation tactics. Please consider sharing this information with faculty, staff, and students. If you are living with an abuser, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text LOVEIS to 22522. Or you can visit thehotline.org and click the “Chat Now” button in the top right corner of the page. After relating my grocery store experience to a colleague, they said they kept thinking about the LGBTQ youth who are now trapped at home with unsupportive family. And now I keep thinking about them, too. Please consider sharing this information about how to get help from The Trevor Project (2020). If you are an LGBTQ youth who is struggling or an ally who knows someone who is struggling, please call the TrevorLifeline at 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678678. Or you can visit TheTrevorProject.org on your computer to chat. And there are children and teens who are living with abusive parents, guardians, or others for whom school may have been their only reprieve. Please consider sharing this information about how to get help from Childhelp (2020). If you are a teenager or child and you are being hurt by someone, know someone who may be, or are afraid that you may hurt someone, please call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 or visit Childhelp.org for live chat.   References Childhelp. (2020). https://www.childhelp.org/childhelp-hotline/ National Domestic Violence Hotline. (2020). https://www.thehotline.org/ The Trevor Project. (2020). https://www.thetrevorproject.org/ ... View more

Photographer Noah Kalina took a photo of himself every day for 20 years. He put them all together into an 8-minute video. When he started this project on January 11, 2000, he was 19.5 years old. When this video ends on January 11, 2020, he was 39.5 years old. That’s 240 months in 480 seconds—one month every two seconds. If you play it at double speed, it will only take four minutes to show—one month every second. Once the recording starts to play, click the gear icon in the bottom right corner of the recording to change your playback speed.  Video Link : 2563 I have been thinking about this video since I first saw it. We watch people age all the time, but to watch it happen so quickly is… I’m not sure what. Jarring? Compelling? Both? This video could be a nice lead-in to your coverage of adulthood. Encourage your students to jot down their reactions as they watch. Afterwards, invite students to share their reactions in pairs/small groups or with the class as a whole. Kalina was born in early July, 1980. The first photo we have of him is in early January, 2000. As a rough starting point (within a few weeks), Kalina is about 19.5 years old in the first photo. In the development chapter, as you move from emerging adulthood to middle adulthood, use these video times to jump ahead in the recording. Approximate Age Video Time 19.5 0:00:02 20 0:00:14 21 0:00:38 22 0:01:02 23 0:01:26 24 0:01:50 25 0:02:14 26 0:02:38 27 0:03:02 28 0:03:26 29 0:03:50 30 0:04:14 31 0:04:38 32 0:05:02 33 0:05:26 34 0:05:50 35 0:06:14 36 0:06:38 37 0:07:02 38 0:07:26 39 0:07:50 39.5 0:08:02   Kalina has also compiled the photos into a collage. It’s difficult to see individual photos, but taken in its entirety, it’s just as compelling as the recording. ... View more

At the end of each term, I ask my Intro Psych students for their top ten list of important concepts they learned in the course. Last fall, interestingly, none of my students put parenting styles in their top ten lists. This term, a quarter of my students did. The only difference between those classes is that this term I asked my students to read an Atlantic article on distracted parenting (Christakis, 2018). In our coverage of development I asked students, after they had read the article, whether they thought this is a new “parenting style” or if it fits one of the existing four: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or neglectful. (Most students called it neglectful, but many weren’t quite ready to go all the way there and called it a “new branch” or a “type” of neglectful parenting.) The article makes for an excellent discussion starter for small groups after you’ve covered parenting styles in class. The discussion of the impact distracted parenting has on children will be meaningful to students since you would have just covered child development. Later when you cover operant conditioning – if you haven’t already done so – you can refer back to this section of the article. Young children will do a lot to get a distracted adult’s attention, and if we don’t change our behavior, they will attempt to do it for us; we can expect to see a lot more tantrums as today’s toddlers age into school. But eventually, children may give up (Christakis, 2018) If the adult drops the phone and attends to the child’s tantrum, the child’s tantrum behavior has been positively reinforced by getting attention, and the adult’s dropping-the-phone behavior has been negatively reinforced by stopping the tantrum. If the adult’s phone is more attention-grabbing than the child’s tantrum, then the adult will ignore the child. The result? Extinction. The child will no longer throw tantrums – or, perhaps, any other behavior that is a plea for adult attention. The author of the article cites two research studies. If you’d like to challenge your students’ research skills, ask them to find those studies. The study that took place in Philadelphia is a pretty easy find because the article’s author gives us the names of the researchers. The Boston research article is a little more challenging because we don’t have clues to the citation. I don’t want to give the reference here because it would make it too easy for your Googling students to find. I can give you a hint, however: it was published in 2014 in a highly-respected peer-reviewed journal. And, if you email me (sfrantz@highline.edu), I would be happy to send you either or both references – as long as I don’t think you’re a student. If you’d like to extend this activity, ask students to assess how well the article’s author did at describing those studies. Did the author hit the important high points? Was there other information in the research articles that would be important for a reader of The Atlantic to know? Reference Christakis, E. (2018). The dangers of distracted parenting. Retrieved August 29, 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/the-dangers-of-distracted-parenting/561752/ ... View more

While on break in St. Andrews (Scotland) last week, I enjoyed a dinner conversation with a celebrated M.I.T. developmental psychologist and a similarly brilliant University of St. Andrews researcher. Among our dinner topics was an impressive recent conceptual replication of Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow test.   Mischel and his colleagues, as you may recall, gave 4-year-olds a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later. Their long-term studies showed that those with the willpower to delay gratification as preschoolers went on as adults to have higher college-completion rates and incomes and fewer addiction problems. This gem in psychology’s lore—that a preschooler’s single behavioral act could predict that child’s life trajectory—is a favorite study for thousands of psychology instructors, and has made it into popular culture—from Sesame’s Street’s Cookie Monster to the conversation of Barack Obama.   In their recent replication of Mischel’s study, Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Hoanan Quen followed a much larger and more diverse sample: 918 children who, at age 4½, took the marshmallow test as part of a 10-site National Institute of Child Health and Human Development child study. Observing the children’s school achievement at age 15, the researchers noted a modest, statistically significant association “between early delay ability and later achievement.” But after controlling for other factors, such as the child’s intelligence, family social status, and education, the effect shriveled.   “Of course!” said one of my dinner companions. Family socioeconomic status (SES) matters. It influences both children’s willingness to await the second marshmallow, and also academic and economic success. As other evidence indicates—see here and here—it is reasonable for children in poverty to seize what’s available now and to not trust promises of greater future rewards.   But my other dinner companion and I posited another factor: Any predictive variable can have its juice drained when we control for myriad other variables. Perhaps part of a child’s ability to delay gratification is intelligence (and the ability to contemplate the future) and experience. If so, controlling for such variables and then asking what’s the residual effect of delay of gratification, per se, is like asking what’s the real effect of a hurricane, per se, after controlling for barometric pressure, wind speed, and storm surge. A hurricane is a package variable, as is delay of gratification.   I put that argument to Tyler Watts, who offered this response: If the ability to delay gratification is really a symptom of other characteristics in a child's life, then interventions designed to change only delay of gratification (but not those other characteristics) will probably not have the effect that you would expect based on the correlation Mischel and Shoda reported. So, if it’s the case that in order to generate the long-term effects reported in Mischel's work, interventions would have to target some combination of SES, parenting, and general cognitive ability, then it seems important to recognize that.     This major new study prompts our reassessing the presumed predictive power of the famed marshmallow test. Given what we’ve known about how hard it is to predict to or from single acts of behavior—or single items on a test or questionnaire—we should not have been surprised. And we should not exaggerate the importance of teaching delay of gratification, apart from other important predictors of life success.   But the new findings do not undermine a deeper lesson: Part of moral development and life success is gaining self-discipline in restraining one’s impulses. To be mature is to forego small pleasures now to earn bigger rewards later. Thus, teacher ratings of children’s self-control (across countless observations) do predict future employment. And parent ratings of young children’s self-regulation predict future social success. Self-control matters. ... View more

Just two days after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, a colleague appeared at my office door on the Highline College campus and said, “I just heard 6 to 8 shots and people screaming.” We waved people into our small office building, and then secured the doors. And waited. Campus Security sent out periodic computer pop-ups, texts, and emails with updates – 8 in all, from the first alert to the all-clear. The communication was welcome. A colleague locked in a classroom with her students had a live feed from a local news station playing on the classroom computer. After dozens of police officers spent two and a half hours going over the college’s 80 acres with a fine-tooth comb – no fewer than 8 rifle-bearing officers looked through the shrubbery in front of our building – no victim(s) and no shooter were found. One campus rumor says that it was lunar new year firecrackers, but I haven’t seen anything that looks like an official report yet. Less than an hour after my colleague came to my door, I got a text from a friend in Harrisonburg, VA asking if I was okay. Harrisonburg is 2,804 miles away; Google Maps says I can drive there in “41 hours without traffic.” I did a news search about halfway into our lockdown and found a report by a UK news outlet. While I understand that we no longer rely on the Pony Express to deliver news, I was still surprised at the speed the news traveled. Especially when there were no known victims. Just the promise of tragedy was enough to send the news around the world. What happens when you barricade a bunch of social science faculty in a small space? You get an impromptu interdisciplinary panel discussion on gun violence courtesy of a political scientist, sociologist, and psychologist. I imagine this would make for a popular course. In my Intro Psych class for this coming week, the topics happen to include the availability heuristic and priming. The availability heuristic tells us that hearing about every mass shooting (or non-shooting as it was on my campus) affects our estimates of violence. Our own non-shooting prompted more than one student or family member of a student to report to journalists that they are considering enrolling only in online classes. Being primed with the Parkland shooting likely influenced the perception of the pops heard on my campus as gunshots and the beginnings of a mass shooting. (The pops may have very well been gunshots and not firecrackers, although the police reported finding no shell casings.) Even though, in the end, it appears that the students and employees of Highline College were never in any danger, that doesn’t erase the terror that so many felt at the time. One student emailed her professor the next day to say that she hasn’t been able to concentrate on studying because of the trauma of running for her life. About 24-hours later, I received a text from a colleague suggesting what we should do differently if we were to experience this again; she’s still processing it. Normal responses. “Resources for dealing with a school shooting” The Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (SCCAP; Division 53 of the American Psychological Association) has created a wiki page of resources. They’re working on putting together a Wikipedia page, but in the meantime you can find their resources for professionals, caregivers, educators, and the public on this Wikiversity page. Several of the resources are curated from The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN). Here’s a direct link to the NCTSN “School Shooting Response” page. The SCCAP Wikiversity page is a work in progress; check it periodically for updates. ... View more

We humans have an overwhelming fear of death. That’s the core assumption of “terror management theory.” It presumes that, when confronted with reminders of our mortality, we display self-protective emotional and cognitive responses. Made to think about dying, we self-defensively cling tightly to our worldviews and prejudices.   On the assumption that dying is terrifying—that death is the great enemy to be avoided at all costs—medicine devotes enormous resources to avoiding death, even to extending life by inches. And should we be surprised? I love being alive and hope to have miles of purposeful life to go before I sleep.   So, do we have the worst of life yet to come? Are we right to view life’s end with despair?   Two psychological science literatures reassure us:   The first: The stability of well-being. Across the life span, people mostly report being satisfied and happy with their lives. Subjective well-being does not plummet in the post-65 years. In later life, stresses also become fewer and life becomes less of an emotional roller coaster.   The second: Human resilience. More than most people suppose, we humans adapt to change. Good events—even a lottery win—elate us for a time, but then we adapt and our normal mix of emotions returns. Bad events—even becoming paralyzed in an accident—devastate us, but only for a while. Both pleasures and tragedies have a surprisingly short half-life. Facing my increasing deafness, the reality of resilience is reassuring.   And now comes a third striking finding: Dying is less traumatic than people suppose. Amelia Goranson and her colleagues examined      blog posts of terminally ill cancer and ALS patients, and      last words of death row inmates before their execution. Others, asked to simulate those posts and words, overly expressed messages filled with despair, anger, and anxiety. More than expected—and increasingly as death approached—the actual words of the dying expressed social connection, love, meaning, and faith.   Goranson and her colleagues presume (though it remains to be shown) that the same acceptance and positivity will be exhibited by those dying at the more expected time on the social clock—very late in life, when people (despite stereotypes of grumpy old men) tend to focus on the positive. Thus, conclude the researchers, “death is more positive than people expect: Meeting the grim reaper may not be as grim as it seems.” ... View more

As y’all know, females and males are mostly alike—in overall intelligence, in physiology, and in how we perceive, learn, and remember. All but one of our chromosomes is unisex. Yet gender differences in mating, relating, and suffering are what grab our attention. And none more than the amazingly widespread and reliably observed gender difference in vulnerability to depression.   In this new Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis, Rachel Salk, Janet Hyde, and Lyn Abramson digest studies of gender and depression involving nearly 2 million people in 90 countries. The overall finding—that women are nearly twice as likely as men to be depressed—is what textbooks have reported. What’s more noteworthy and newsworthy, in addition to the universality of women’s greater risk of depression, is the even larger risk for girls during adolescence. As their figure, below, shows, the gender difference in major depression begins early—by puberty—and peaks in early adolescence. The take-home lesson: For many girls, being 13- to 15-years-old can be a tough time of life. ... View more

As Nathan DeWall and I explain in Psychology, 11 th Edition, “Young infants lack object permanence—the awareness that objects continue to exist even when not perceived. By 8 months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen.”   Given the early age at which infants display object permanence by looking for a hidden toy after a several second wait do developing primates also display a recall for objects no longer seen?   Research suggests that orangutans possess object permanence. . . . a point illustrated in this hilarious 38-second YouTube video pointed out to me by a Facebook engineer who happens to be one of my former students (and also one of my children ). ... View more

“Egocentricism,” as every psychology student has read, was Jean Piaget’s description of preschoolers’ inability to take another person’s perspective. The child standing between you and the TV just can’t see your perspective.   And it’s not just children. As Nathan DeWall and I explain in Psychology, 11 th Edition, Even we adults may overestimate the extent to which others share our opinions and perspectives, a trait known as the curse of knowledge. We assume that something will be clear to others if it is clear to us, or that email recipients will “hear” our “just kidding” intent (Epley et al., 2004; Kruger et al., 2005). Perhaps you can recall asking someone to guess a simple tune such as “Happy Birthday” as you clapped or tapped it out. With the tune in your head, it seemed so obvious! But you suffered the egocentric curse of knowledge, by assuming that what was in your head was also in someone else’s.   In the May/June Scientific American Mind (alas, its last print issue), Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik describe a “Venus effect” (previously noted by University of Liverpool psychologist Marco Bertamini and his colleagues). In various art depictions, the grand masters have depicted their subjects looking toward a mirror. Reubens' "Venus in Front of a Mirror" Veláquez's "Rokeby Venus"                               Many people presume that Venus, in the image above, is looking at (and admiring) herself in the mirror. If that was your surmise (as it was mine, when viewing “Rokeby Venus”), then you are not taking her perspective. Think: If you, from your viewing perspective, can see her face in the mirror, then she must see yours (not hers). It’s akin to being a backseat car passenger and seeing the driver’s face in the mirror—which tells you that the driver sees your face in the same mirror.   As the Venus effect reminds us, egocentricism is not just for children. ... View more

On the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook page, Cait Alice was asking for advice on how to handle a student’s misconception of how gender works. Allison Matthews recommended the gender unicorn created by the Trans Student Educational Resources group*.  If you’d like to turn this into a class activity, identify how many groups of 3 you will have in your class. Let’s say 16. Print out 16 copies, and then mark different spots on each continuum for each group.   Show students one as an example of what you are asking them to do. Using the graphic above, explain to students that the person identifies primarily as a woman who dresses and acts more masculine than feminine, whose assigned sex was female, and who is not physically attracted to anyone but is emotionally attracted to men and women with a slight preference for the former. Distribute the marked up gender unicorn handouts to your student groups, asking each group to describe their person. Walk around to each of the groups answering any questions they have. After discussion dies down, ask groups to pair up to share their descriptions. If time allows, invite a few volunteers to display their gender unicorn on the classroom’s document camera and describe their person. As a wrap-up to the activity, encourage students to think about where they fall on each of the gender unicorn dimensions – although your students probably already did this as soon as you showed them the infographic. Give each student an unmarked copy of the infographic to share with friends and family. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * This is an edited post. The original post featured the Genderbread Person ostensibly created by Sam Killermann. A few people, including Allison Matthews, reported a concern with accusations of plagiarism by Killermann. A friend and colleague shared with me this analysis of the plagiarism accusation. Because of the potential issues with plagiarism, I've decided to use an image created by "the only national organization entirely led by trans youth." ... View more

It can be an eye-opener for a parent when their child starts to mimic their behavior in the form of pretend play. Even more so when what is being portrayed is pre-divorce arguments and the stand-ins are Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. After covering observational learning (learning) or pretend play (development), share with students this example courtesy of Carol Weis and the New York Times (2016). Weis and her soon-to-be ex-husband had had a number of arguments leading up to their decision to divorce. It was near Christmas, and the house decorations included a nativity set. The parents explained to their then-5-year-old daughter that they were separating. Following her father’s moving out, the child began to play with the nativity set. “Through her thoughtful manipulation, Mary and Joseph carried on arguments with each other, similar to the ones she’d witnessed between her dad and [her mom].” In the category of observational learning, I had a student years ago who said one day when she was picking up her 3-year-old son from preschool, the staff asked to speak with her for a minute. That day at recess, her son was near the top of the slide waiting for another child to slide down. He got impatient and yelled, “Too slow b****! Get the **** out of my way!” My student, somewhat sheepishly, said to the class, “I have a problem with road rage.” If you discuss the nativity example during observational learning, give students an opportunity to share their favorite examples of observational learning. They could be their own experiences or what they witnessed in younger siblings or their own children. If you discuss the nativity example during development, give students an opportunity to share their favorite examples of pretend play. Again, they could be their own experiences or what they witnessed in younger siblings or their own children.   In either case, consider using think-pair-share. Give students a minute or two to consider their examples, then a couple minutes to share with a neighbor, then ask for a few volunteers to share their examples.   REFERENCE Weis, C. (2016, December 23). Working through divorce with Mary and Joseph. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/well/family/working-through-divorce-with-mary-and-joseph.html ... View more

Help students understand the symptoms of dementia by experiencing some of those                     symptoms themselves through the free “A Walk Through Dementia” Android app created by Alzheimer’s Research UK in cooperation with Google UK volunteers. There are four videos: a short introduction to dementia, visiting the supermarket, walking home, and making tea. The videos illustrate a number of dementia symptoms which are presented as a bulleted list at the end of each video. While the videos can be experienced in both the Android app and (3 out of 4 videos) on YouTube (see below), the more powerful experience is the interactive virtual reality (VR) version. For the VR experience, students will need an Android phone, the free “A Walk Through Dementia” app available through Google Play, headphones (which students likely already have), and VR goggles. Affordable VR goggles can be purchased here. And by affordable, I mean KnoxLabs is running a fall 2016 sale where their cardboard goggles are $5 each. There are several other goggles available for around $15 each.  A quick note of caution. Running any VR app on my Galaxy S6 phone heats it up pretty quickly. I can watch just a few minutes of VR before my app is shut down for overheating. My phone cools down rapidly, and in short order I can watch another video. Your mileage may vary. As an in-class VR activity, divide students into groups of three to six. The number of groups you have will depend on how many VR googles you have. Make sure there is at least one Android phone owner in each group. Ask the Android phone owners to search for and download from Google Play the “A Walk Through Dementia” app. Groups are to plug in the headphones, run the app, and put the phone in the goggles. Have each group member go through a different scenario, i.e. one group member experiences the grocery store, another experiences the walk home, and another experiences making tea. (If there are six students per group, each video is watched by two students.) While experiencing VR, students can sit or stand, but they absolutely should not walk. It’s too disorienting – falling would be expected. At the end of each video, the student who watched it notes the symptoms depicted. Once everyone has watched a video, each student explains to the others in the group what they experienced, being sure to outline the symptoms. Give students an opportunity to share their experience in the VR world with the class. Ask what was most surprising about what they learned. Introduction Video Link : 1780   Walking home Video Link : 1781 Making tea Video Link : 1782 ... View more

You and your spouse are in a grocery store. You see a man in his mid-40s walking with a 5-year-old girl. He has the girl’s hair wrapped around the handle of the grocery cart. The girl is “crying: ‘Please stop! I won’t do it again’” (Mele, 2016). Before covering the bystander effect, describe that scenario to your students. Ask your students to jot down what they would do, and then share their responses with one or two students near them. Ask for volunteers to share their responses (or collect anonymous responses by paper or using a classroom response system). Note the responses. Do they fall into the bystander intervention decision tree? We first have to notice that something is happening. Since the scenario is presented, students have no choice but to notice. But do some students respond by saying that they would act like they hadn’t noticed? After noticing, we have to interpret what we are seeing as something that needs our attention. Did some of your students decide that it was okay for this man to treat this child this way? Do your students differ on what appropriate parenting looks like? Lastly, we have to decide that we have a responsibility to help. That help can take many forms, from confronting the man to contacting store security to calling the police. The type of help given may depend on how threatened the students believe they would be by the man. Introduce this decision tree to students using their responses. This incident took place in Cleveland, Texas in mid-September, 2016. A woman, Erika Burch, who was shopping with her husband did respond. She confronted the man. He did not let the girl go. The woman called 911. A police officer who happened to be in the store quickly appeared, and at that point, the man – the girl’s father – let go of the child’s hair. If time allows, ask students who chose not to intervene in the hypothetical situation how the scenario would have needed to be different for them to intervene. For students who chose to intervene, ask what kinds of parenting discipline would be okay enough for them not to intervene.   References Mele, C. (2016, September 28). Should you intervene when a parent harshly disciplines a child in public? Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/us/should-you-intervene-when-a-parent-harshly-disciplines-a-child-in-public.html ... View more

It’s easy to see where our perception of how much danger a child is in would influence how much moral outrage we feel toward the child’s parent. But check this out; it works the other way, too. The moral outrage we feel toward a parent influences how much danger we believe the child is in (Thomas, Stanford, & Sarnecka, 2016; see Lombrozo, 2016 for an interview with the researchers). Give half of your students scenario A and the other half scenario B. You can print these and distribute each to half of your class, or you can ask each half of the class to close their eyes while you display each scenario on the classroom screen, or you can make the scenarios available to each half of your class through your learning management system. Scenario A “Sandy A. (26) is a safety inspector and the mother of 10-month-old baby Olivia. On Tuesday evenings, Sandy takes Olivia to a "Mommy and Me" exercise class at a gym. One evening in early fall, Sandy and Olivia finish class and return to their car, which is parked in the gym's cool underground parking garage. Sandy buckles Olivia into her car seat (where Olivia immediately falls asleep), locks the car, and walks a few steps to the parking machine to pay for their parking. On her way back, Sandy is hit by a car and knocked unconscious. The driver immediately calls an ambulance, which takes Sandy to the hospital. No one realizes that Sandy had a child with her, or that Olivia is asleep in the back of the car. Olivia is in the car, asleep, for about 45 minutes until Sandy regains consciousness and alerts hospital staff” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). Scenario B “Sandy A. (26) is a safety inspector and the mother of 10-month-old Baby Olivia. On Tuesday evenings, Sandy goes to meet her best friend's husband (with whom she is having a secret affair) in his private office at the gym where he's the manager. At these times, she leaves Olivia with her mom (Olivia's grandma). One evening in early fall, Olivia's grandma is out of town. So Sandy drives to the gym and parks in the gym's cool underground parking garage. Olivia, who is buckled into her carseat, falls asleep as soon as the car stops moving. Sandy locks the car and goes into the gym. Olivia is in the car, asleep, for about 45 minutes until Sandy returns” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). After students have read their assigned scenario, ask students “to estimate (on a scale of 1 to 10) how much danger the child was in during the parent’s absence” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). Collect the responses (on paper, or through an in-class student response system, or through your learning management system) and calculate means. Note that in both cases the child’s experience is the same. The only difference is why the child was left alone. In the Thomas, et.al. study, participants rated the danger to Olivia very differently depending on whether her aloneness was due to the mother’s unintentional absence (mean of 5.47) or due to the mother’s having an affair (mean of 8.28). The authors posit that the moral outrage toward the parent, in this example the mother, comes first, and then to justify the moral outrage, we imagine the child to be in grave danger. Just a generation ago, it was the norm to leave children unsupervised. Now, parents are condemned – and sometimes arrested – for doing so. The authors “suggest that much of the recent hysteria concerning danger to unsupervised children is the product of this feedback loop, in which inflated estimates of risk lead to a new moral norm against leaving children alone, and then the need to justify moral condemnation of parents who violate this norm leads in turn to even more inflated estimates of risk, generating even stronger moral condemnation of parents who violate the norm, and so on” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). If you decide to cover this topic when you talk about parenting, introduce students to the availability heuristic – making judgments based on how available information is in memory. We hear about every child abduction or attempted abduction by a stranger in our city or region, so we anticipate the risk to be much greater than it actually is. Ask students, “What percentage of children disappear, including those who are killed, at the hands of a stranger annually?” The answer: 0.00007% -- that’s one in 1.4 million (Gardner, 2009). Small group or short writing assignment questions: What were the independent and dependent variables in this experiment? What results would you expect if the mother went to work, engaged in a volunteer activity, or did a relaxing activity instead? (Intentionally leaving the child alone was perceived as more dangerous than unintentionally leaving the child alone, and the more voluntary the behavior became, the greater the perceived risk to the child.) What if the parent were the father instead of the mother? (The same pattern, for the most part, appeared when the parent depicted was a father. Although, the risk to the child was seen as less likely when the father went to work than when the mother went to work. Is work seen as less voluntary for fathers?) Is this moral outrage inherently classist? In other words, are parents living in poverty or working class parents more likely to leave children alone out of need than middle class parents or wealthy parents? Are there benefits to children who spend some of their time unsupervised? (Increased problem-solving skills? Increased social skills developed through play with other unsupervised children?) At what age and under what circumstances should children be permitted to be unsupervised? Explain your reasoning. Have cellphones become surrogate supervisors? (Parents can call at any time. Parents can GPS track their children.)   References Gardner, D. (2009). The science of fear: How the culture of fear manipulates your brain. New York, NY: Plume. as cited in Thomas, A.J., Stanford, P.K. & Sarnecka, B.W., (2016). No child left alone: Moral judgments about parents affect estimates of risk to children. Collabra, 2(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.33 Lombrozo, T. (2016, August 22). Why do we judge parents for putting kids at perceived - but unreal - risk? Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/08/22/490847797/why-do-we-judge-parents-for-putting-kids-at-perceived-but-unreal-risk Thomas, A.J., Stanford, P.K. & Sarnecka, B.W., (2016). No child left alone: Moral judgments about parents affect estimates of risk to children. Collabra, 2(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.33 ... View more