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

Between spending a lot of time thinking about what people need to know about psychology—and, thus, what we should cover in Intro Psych—and thinking about intimate partner violence (IPV), it is glaringly apparent that IPV belongs in the Intro Psych course.* One place to address the topic is in the social psychology chapter, right after covering foot-in-the-door. Ask students to use their web-enabled devices to visit this University of Michigan Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center website or show the website on your screen. Briefly describe each of the eight tactics that may be used by an abuser. Set aside one tactic to use as an example of what you would like students to do during this activity. Divide your class into seven groups, assigning one tactic to each group. If you have a larger class (or want to use smaller groups), divide your class into, say, fourteen groups, where two groups will each be addressing the same tactic. Explain that each of these tactics may start with something small and then gradually increase in severity: foot-in-the-door. In one study, "[T]he women described how the violence occurred in a more or less insidious and gradual manner, first finding expression in the form of psychological violence through control, jealousy and disparaging comments about the woman, her relatives or friends, and attempts to circumscribe her existence" (Scheffer Lindgren & Renck, 2008).  Because of the gradual escalation, the tactics can be hard to see. The goal of this activity is to make that gradual escalation visible, here, in the safety of the classroom. By knowing what to look for, you may be better able to see the warning signs or red flags in your own relationships or in the relationships of a friend or family member. Instructions to students: For your assigned abuse tactic, identify what the most severe demonstration of that abuse may be. Next, identify what you think may be the least severe demonstration of that abuse. Finally, fill in at least two intermediary steps. Using the tactic you set aside as an example, ask students for what the most severe demonstration of that abuse may be. For example, if you chose “Using Isolation,” the most severe may be the abuser not allowing their partner to communicate with anyone. Next, ask students what the initial foot in the door may look like. Perhaps the abuser doesn’t tell their partner when friends have called. Finally, ask students to fill in two intermediary steps, such as breaking their partner’s cellphone and perhaps, next, not allowing their partner to drive anywhere alone. Now ask students to take a couple minutes to think on their own to identify at least four foot-in-the-door steps for their assigned tactic. Least severe, somewhat severe, more severe, and most severe. Think of these as light yellow flags, bright yellow flags, orange flags, and red flags. A light yellow flag may seem harmless, but it could indicate the potential for escalation. Next, ask students to share in their assigned groups the behaviors that they identified. The group's task is to rank order the behaviors from least severe to most severe.  Once discussion winds down, ask groups to share their rank orderings. Detecting relationship patterns that may be unhealthy can lead to positive outcomes (Wuest & Merritt-Gray, 2008). Wrap up this activity by sharing with your students community or campus resources they can turn to for support. Be sure to include this national resource for your students’ friends and family who may not be local: The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available to “talk confidentially with anyone experiencing domestic violence, seeking resources or information, or questioning unhealthy aspects of their relationship.” Call them 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.   While these directions are for an in-class or live-video (with breakout rooms) class session, instructions may be adapted for an online class discussion board (ask students to post, say, four behaviors before seeing others' posts) or as a stand-alone assignment.   *Special thank you to social psychologist and intimate partner violence researcher Kiersten Baughman for sharing her expertise with me References   Scheffer Lindgren, M., & Renck, B. (2008). Intimate partner violence and the leaving process: Interviews with abused women. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 3(2), 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482620801945805 Wuest, J., & Merritt-Gray, M. (2008). A theoretical understanding of abusive intimate partner relationships that become non-violent: Shifting the pattern of abusive control. Journal of Family Violence, 23(4), 281–293. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-008-9155-x ... 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

With colleges and universities moving their face-to-face classes online or into a live video format during this Spring 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, some faculty are being forced to confront an unpleasant reality: they don’t like how they sound or look when recorded. The mere exposure effect The more we see or hear something, the more—in general—we like it. That is called the mere exposure effect. Our voice Because of how the sound of our own voice travels from our throat to our ears, it sounds different in our heads than it does to the people around us. We have spent a lifetime listening to our voices produced that way, and so that is the voice we prefer. Microphones record our “outside” voice. Microphones pick up the sound of our voice as the people around us hear it. They like that voice because it’s the one they hear. We hate it because it doesn’t sound like our voice to us. It’s not the one we hear. Our face Symmetrical faces are perceived to be more attractive than asymmetrical faces. I hate to be the one to deliver this news, but your face probably is not symmetrical. And I know, speaking as one who does not have a symmetrical face. We have, again, spent a lifetime looking at our own faces—in a mirror. We much prefer this “mirrored” view of ourselves than we do, say, a photograph of ourselves, you know, the way other people see us. Try this. Take a photo of yourself. Use your phone’s or computer’s image editing tools to flip the photo to its mirror image. You will probably like the mirrored photograph more than the original—the view of yourself that you see most often. Ask your friends and family which one they prefer. Most often they’ll choose the original photo—the view of yourself that they see most often. No wonder we hate recording ourselves Recordings we make of ourselves don’t sound like us, and the view is not one we’re used to seeing. It’s a wonder that anyone ever consents to being recorded. Keep in mind that any recording you make is not for you. Your recording is—in the case of faculty—for your students. How you look and how you sound matches their reality. While you may not like it, they like matching the sound and face of the real you with the sound and face of the recorded you. And after all, your students are the ones your recordings are for. Check your recording software for a mirror image setting While there’s nothing I can do about your voice, some recording/webconferencing tools—like Zoom—include the ability to switch your webcam to mirror image. This feature was designed to better help you make sense of what you’re seeing on camera. In regular webcam view, it’s a challenge to get your stray hair back in place. Your right hand is on the left side of the screen and as you move your right hand toward your left, on the screen your right hand moves to the right. Everything is backwards! When you enable mirror image, it is just like you are looking in a mirror. Your right hand is on the right. When you move your right hand left, the webcam image of your hand also moves left. And you know what? Since this is how you see yourself all the time in your bathroom mirror, you’ll like how you look a lot more. But here’s the extra cool part. While the camera view looks like a mirror to you, it has not changed for your viewers. They will still see you as they would if they were standing in front of you. And that’s also the view that will be recorded. Not the mirror view. (Shout out to my colleague Eric Baer for showing me this in Zoom!) Theater vs. television/film While we are talking about recording yourself, now is a good time to remember that if you have spent most of your career standing in front of a classroom, you are a performer. Like theater-trained actors, you have honed your craft so that your gestures and emotions carry to the back of your classroom. Many theater-trained actors struggle when they go from the stage to the screen. Television and movie cameras are intimate machines—as are webcams. They are right up in your face, recording every wrinkle and every muscle twitch. Toning down your expressiveness for your webcam recording may not come easily to you. If you are wildly expressive on camera, don’t worry too much about it. Just know that it’s part of your “stage” presentation style. With practice, you could learn to dial it back, but that’s probably not worth your energy right now. No students are going to be harmed by your exuberance.   Go record yourself Go forth. Take a deep breath. And make a recording. ... View more

Ingroups can be pretty powerful. We tend to like people in our ingroups more than people in our outgroups (ingroup bias), and we tend to see people in our outgroups as being more like each other than people in our ingroups (outgroup homogeneity bias), for example. There is much rhetoric about Democrats vs. Republicans, immigrants/refugees vs. native born, the wealthy vs. the middle class vs. the working poor, people with homes vs. people who are homeless. Depending on where you live, the groups may be different than these, but the groups are there. The next time you cover ingroups/outgroups, ask your students what groups are most salient to them – on your campus or in your town/city. If you’re in a small college town, it may be the townies vs. those at the college. Write down the names of the groups where students can see them. If time allows, ask your students to work in pairs or small groups to generate examples of how ingroup bias or outgroup homogeneity bias has affected or could affect how each group sees themselves and sees the other. Next, show this 3-minute TV2 Denmark ad that aired in 2017. Video Link : 2526 Ask students to share their reactions to the video. If they could get their-previously-identified groups together, what questions would they ask? Who likes pizza? Who likes dogs? Who likes cats? Who likes to drive?   Close this activity by pointing out ingroups/outgroups shift depending on context. When one context—politics, for example—is continually salient, it’s easy to forget that we have plenty in common with members of our—say, political—outgroup. What strategies might your students use to help them remember that they may have a lot in common with an outgroup member, and to remember that, in a different context, that person is probably a member of their ingroup? ... View more

“Nature doesn’t kill people with avalanches. People kill people with avalanches” (Julavits, 2020, p. 26). Heidi Julavits tells us that in avalanche school she learned about six psychological concepts* that can cause back-country winter enthusiasts to make poor decisions—and then she went on to discuss how these very same factors led her, her classmates, and her avalanche instructors to make some poor decisions when they went out to the slopes (Julavits, 2020). Julavits makes it clear that knowing how psychological concepts can have a negative impact on our decisions doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll make different decisions in the moment. This article reminds me—once again—that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient to change behavior. For example, I know what healthy eating and healthy exercise look like, and I know their benefits. That doesn’t mean that I always make the best decisions regarding healthy eating and healthy exercise. Knowledge is good. It’s just not enough. The Intro Psych thinking chapter or social psych chapter are good places to discuss these psychological concepts—and then help students think through ways of countering them so they don’t get sucked in when needing to make decisions that may indeed be life and death decisions. While the context here happens to be avalanches—and the avoidance thereof—these psychological concepts can be applied to almost any context where a decision needs to be made. Ian McCammon, a mechanical engineer, started thinking a lot about avalanches following the death of a friend. While his focus has been on the mechanics of avalanches, after researching 715 such accidents, he wrote about six psychological concepts that people may use out on the slopes that can lead to disaster (McCammon, 2004). These are the psychological concepts Julavits introduced to us in her avalanche school article (Julavits, 2020). McCammon (2004) begins with this premise: As sad as this accident was [the one that led to the death of his friend], the real tragedy is that similar stories unfold in accident after accident, year after year. An experienced party, often with avalanche training, makes a crucial decision to descend, cross, or highmark a slope they believe is safe. And then they trigger an avalanche that buries one or more of them. In hindsight, the danger was often obvious before these accidents happened, and so people struggle to explain how intelligent people with avalanche training could have seen the hazard, looked straight at it, and behaved as if it wasn’t there. (p.1) The Psychological Concepts Familiarity When we are in familiar surroundings, we are more likely to act just as we have acted in the past. That’s fine as long as the conditions are exactly the same. If they have changed, behaving the same way may not be the best course of action. In McCammon’s archival research, he found that people did indeed take more risks when they were in an area familiar to them. Consistency Once we’ve made a decision, it’s easiest to keep making decisions that are consistent with that first decision. Again, this is fine as long as the conditions stay the same. As conditions change, staying consistent with our first decision may lead to trouble. McCammon found that the groups most committed to being out on the slope took the most risks. Acceptance We want to be accepted by others, so we do things that we believe will lead to their acceptance. Straight men may make poor decisions in order to increase their chances of being accepted by women. McCammon found that groups that included both men and women made riskier decisions, and this seemed to be driven primarily by men making poor decisions, not the women. Expert halo An “informal leader” may spontaneously emerge in the group. This person may have experience or skill, may be older, or may just be more assertive. The group may give this person an “expert halo” and assume the person has expertise they don’t actually possess. McCammon found that groups that had someone that could be identified as a leader took greater risks. Social facilitation When people are confident in their abilities, the more people that are present, the more confident people become. McCammon found that groups that had avalanche training took greater risks if their group had met up with another group prior to the avalanche. Those who had not had avalanche training were less affected by the presence of another group.   Scarcity We value more that which is scarce. New, unblemished snow is scarce and, thus, is highly valued. Indeed, McCammon found that skiers heading to untracked snow took greater risks than those headed to previously-skied snow. Other examples If you live where your students ski or snowboard, this avalanche safety example may resonate with your students. In any case, ask your students to consider other situations where a group has to make a decision about whether or not it is safe to proceed. Boating on a body of water with choppy waves? Rafting on a river with unusually high water? Driving in an area where there is a tornado watch or warning? Weighing whether to stay or move inland with an approaching hurricane. Whatever situation is most likely for your student population, ask your students to identify how each of the factors discussed above may lead to a decision that may result in disaster. Overcoming these factors Now the hard part. Ask students what they could do to recognize these factors at play in the moment and, just importantly, how they could counteract them. As a take-home assignment, ask students to investigate strategies that help keep people from falling into these traps. During the next class session, ask students to share what they learned. Conclusion A lot of what we cover in the Intro Psych course has the potential to change a student’s life. This topic has the potential to save a student’s life.   References Julavits, H. (2020, January). Calamity lesson. New York Times Magazine, 24–31, 48. McCammon, I. (2004). Heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents: Evidence and implications. Avalanche Review, 22(68). Retrieved from www.snowpit.com.   *Julavits and McCammon refer to these concepts as heuristics. In Intro Psych, some of these are considered simply principles or concepts, so I’ve replaced the term heuristics with “psychological concepts.”   ... View more

Probably like you, a lot of my Intro Psych students are interested in medicine. Most are interested in nursing, but a smattering are interested in becoming physicians or another type of medical professional, such as respiratory therapists. This New York Times article (Brown & Bergman, 2019), coauthored by nurse and a physician, will be of interest to these future medical professionals in your course. After covering ingroups/outgroups and superordinate goals in the social psychology chapter, ask your students to read the article and address these questions. What factors contribute to dividing medical professionals into the subgroups of doctors and nurses? For example, physicians have higher status than nurses.   What superordinate goal do the article authors suggest would bring nurses and doctors together? At about 1,000 words, the article is short enough for students to read and discuss in class. Alternatively, it’s an excellent real-world example to bring into your lecture.   From the new APA Intro Psych student learning outcomes, this activity addresses: Identify examples of relevant and practical applications of psychological principles to everyday life. Integrative theme: Applying psychological principles can changes our lives in positive ways.   Reference Brown, T., & Bergman, S. (2019, December 31). Doctors, nurses and the paperwork crisis that could unite them. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/opinion/doctors-nurses-and-the-paperwork-crisis-that-could-unite-them.html ... View more

Cartoonists have pretty good insight into the workings of the human mind. How many of them took Intro Psych? These comics will jazz up your next research methods, cognition, personality, learning, and social psych lectures. Dilbert's boss does not have an operational definition of "employee engagement," and, thus, no way to measure it. Also, on the ethics side, no, it's not okay to make up data. Lio, having no trouble with functional fixedness, repurposes an object into a sled. Lio’s friends aren’t typical. His ingroups include monsters, aliens, and death himself. When everyone else sees those creatures as part of a threatening outgroup, to Lio, they are just his friends. Also, you don’t have to read through too many strips to see Lio’s strong internal locus of control. Rat in Pearls Before Swine can be counted on for a solid outgroup homogeneity bias. Jeremy’s mom in Zits provides a nice example of positive punishment. No, I don’t think he’ll forget his textbook at home again. Or, perhaps more likely, if he does forget it at home, he won’t ask his mom to bring it to school. After all, punishment makes us better at avoiding the punishment. Caulfield, the boy in Frazz, wonders if Santa has fallen victim to the just-world phenomenon. Pig in Pearls Before Swine, whose sweetness and innocence may be unparalleled in the comics universe, does not fall for the fundamental attribution error. Looking for more example from the comics? Here are some previous comic-focused blog posts: Spotlight effect Door-in-the-Face, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning Change blindness, priming, and positive reinforcement ... View more

Here’s some information the business majors taking your Intro Psych class should be thinking about. During the social psychology chapter, pose this question to your students: Is it good for employees to know how much money their managers and their coworkers are making? Why? Give students a couple minutes to think about this. If you’d like, let students discuss with one or two people around them. If you have an audience response system, ask each question separately. “Is it good for employees to know how much money their managers are making?” Ask volunteers to share their reasoning. Next, ask “Is it good for employees to know how much their coworkers are making?” Again, ask volunteers to share their reasoning. Zoë Cullen (Harvard Business School) and Ricardo Perez-Truglia (UCLA) wondered the same thing. You’re welcome to read the working paper or a summary written by the authors for the Harvard Business Review. Managers (vertical inequality) Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) asked a couple thousand employees of “a large commercial bank in Asia” to guess how much their manager made. They thought that their managers made about 14% less than they actually did. The researchers then randomly assigned the employees to either learn how much their managers actually made or to remain in the dark. With the assistance of the bank, researchers “gathered daily timestamp, email, and sales data for the year following our survey.” Learning that their managers made more money than they thought resulted in employees working more hours, sending more email messages, and selling more than those who did not learn how much their managers actually made. In fact, the more off employees were in their estimates, the more work they did. And the closer the manager was on the corporate ladder to the employee, the more pronounced the effect. “[A]fter realizing that these managers get paid more, employees became more optimistic about the salaries they will earn themselves five years in the future.”  Coworkers (horizontal inequality) Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) asked those same research participants to guess the salaries of “the other employees with the same position and title, from the same unit.” While the participants were closer in accuracy with their guesses than they were with managers, most still underestimated how much their coworkers were making. Again, participants were randomly assigned to learn how much their coworkers actually made or to remain in the dark. Using the same “daily timestamp, email, and sales data for the year following our survey,” researchers found employees worked less than their in-the-dark counterparts. And they didn’t work just a little bit less. “ Finding out that peers earn on average 10% more than initially thought caused employees to spend 9.4% fewer hours in the office, send 4.3% fewer emails, and sell 7.3% less.” This is a beautiful – if unfortunate – example of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is “the perception by an individual that the amount of a desired resource (e.g., money, social status) he or she has is less than some comparison standard. This standard can be the amount that was expected or the amount possessed by others with whom the person compares himself or herself” (American Psychological Association, n.d.) When we experience relative deprivation, we feel worse. And when that relative deprivation is experienced in a work setting, that feeling worse translates into working less. Discussion Ask your students to imagine that they are employers. How might they handle salary information? Would they be transparent, letting everyone know how much everyone is paid? Would they release average salaries by position type rather than attach names to salaries? And should different people who hold the same position be paid different salaries? Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) offer a couple suggestions. “[K]eep salaries compressed among employees in the same position, but offer them large raises when they get promoted to a higher position.” “[T]ransparency about average pay for a position, without disclosing individual salaries.”   The researchers conclude their Harvard Business Review article with this advice.   We encourage you to start experimenting with transparency at your company.  The first step is to figure out what your employees want. You can find out through anonymous surveys. Just mention some alternatives that you consider viable, and let them voice their preferences. For instance, do your employees feel informed about their salaries five years down the road? Would they want to find out the average pay two or three promotions ahead? Once you look at the survey results, you can decide what information to disclose and how. According to our findings, signals about the enticing paychecks waiting five years in the future is the push they need to be at their best.   References American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Relative deprivation. Retrieved December 26, 2018, from https://dictionary.apa.org/relative-deprivation Cullen, Z., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2018). The motivating (and demotivating) effects of learning others’ salaries. Retrieved December 27, 2018, from https://hbr.org/2018/10/the-motivating-and-demotivating-effects-of-learning-others-salaries ... View more

There are a lot of social psychological concepts that can help explain road rage. This Seattle Times article (Doughton, 2018) beautifully identifies a number of these concepts. Students will see how social psychology tells us something about our everyday lives. And, hopefully, students will remember this the next time they find themselves overly angry at the behavior of strangers. You can use the article in any number of ways. Pull out the examples to frame your social psychology lecture After students read the chapter, but before you cover the concepts in class, ask students, as a homework assignment, to identify the social psychological concepts Before you cover these concepts, ask students to read the article, then, in small groups, identify the social psychological concepts After your social psychology lecture, ask students to read the article, and then in small groups, identify the social psychological concepts If your students are reading the article and identifying the concepts, ask students to define the concepts they find in their own words, quote sections of the article that illustrate each of those concepts, and, finally, explain how the quotes they found illustrate each of the concepts students have identified. To make it easier, give students these concepts to find in the article: Deindividuation Fundamental attribution error Self-serving bias Outgroup homogeneity bias If you’d like students to reflect on previous content they’ve learned about in their Intro Psych course, ask them to identify examples of these concepts in the article: Sympathetic nervous system arousal Observational learning Long-term effects of stress References Doughton, S. (2018, November 2). How to keep your head from exploding in Seattle traffic. Seattle Times. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/how-to-keep-your-head-from-exploding-in-seattle-traffic ... View more

Mexican immigrants, President Trump has repeatedly told his approving base, are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In this week’s West Virginia rally he highlighted Mollie Tibbetts’ accused “illegal alien” killer as a vivid example. Hence the wish to “build a wall”—to keep out those who, we are told, would exploit Americans and take their jobs. In an earlier 2018 essay, I responded to the inaccuracy of fear mongering about immigrant crime. But consider a different question: Who believes it? Is it people who live in regions with a greater number of unauthorized immigrants, and who have suffered the presumed crime, conflict, and competition? At the recent Sydney Symposium on Social Psychology, Christian Unkelbach (University of Cologne) reported an intriguing finding: In Germany, anti-immigrant views are strongest in the states with fewest immigrants. Across Germany’s 16 states, intentions to vote for the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany [AfD]) was greatest in states with the fewest asylum applications. (My thanks to Dr. Unkelbach for permission to share his translated figure.) I wondered: Might a similar pattern emerge  in U.S. states? To find out, I combined two data sets: A 2016 Pew report provided data on the percentage of unauthorized immigrants in each state’s population. A 2016 PRRI report provided state-by-state data on immigrant acceptance. The result? Voila! In the United States, more immigrants predicts more state-level acceptance of immigrants. And fewer immigrants predicts more fear of immigrants. (West Virginia, with the lowest unauthorized immigrant proportion, also is the least immigrant-supportive.) Moreover, the U.S. correlations are very similar to the German: Across the 16 German states, the correlation between immigrant noncitizen population and anti-immigrant attitudes was -.61. Across the 50 U.S. states, the correlation between immigrant noncitizen population and immigrant-supportive attitudes was +.72. The legendary prejudice researcher Thomas Pettigrew would not be surprised. In a new article at age 87 (I want to be like him when I grow up), Pettigrew reports that in 477 studies of nearly 200,000 people across 36 cultures, intergroup contact predicted lower prejudice in every culture. With cross-racial contact, especially cooperative contact, people from South Africa to the United States develop more favorable racial attitudes. In a new study by Jared Nai and colleagues, living in a racially diverse U.S. neighborhood—or even just imagining doing so—leads people to identify more with all humanity, and to help strangers more. As straight folks get to know gay folks, they, too, become more gay-supportive. And, these new data suggest, as citizens interact with and benefit from their immigrant neighbors, they, too, become more open-hearted and welcoming. In my own Midwestern town, where minority students (mostly Hispanic) are a slight majority of public school students, these yard signs (this one from my front yard) abound. We have known enough immigrants—as neighbors, colleagues, business owners, and workers—to know that they, like our own immigrant ancestors, can be a blessing. [Afterword: In kindly commenting on this essay, Thomas Pettigrew noted that one exception to the contact-with-immigrants benefit occurs “when the infusion of newcomers is large and sudden.  Then threat takes over without the time for contact to work its magic” (quoted with permission).] ... View more

In my last blog post, I wrote about one of the common street scams in Paris, the petition scam that relies on foot-in-the-door to work. Another common street scam is the friendship bracelet. The scam A person approaches the mark, wraps string around the mark’s finger, makes a string bracelet, ties it around the mark’s wrist, and then demands money in exchange for the bracelet that the mark cannot remove without a pocket knife. Here it is in action. Notice how the mark tries to ignore the scammer and how the scammer ignores the mark’s protests and gets the string around his finger and starts twisting the string. It’s tight enough that the mark can’t get it off. At the end, another scammer demands the fee while the original scammer readies his string for the next mark – and scratches himself. Video Link : 2269 Norm of reciprocity What drives the scam is the norm of reciprocity. When someone does something for us, we feel compelled to do something in return – even when what we received is not something we wanted. A new research article, reported on by the British Psychological Society Research Digest, suggests that some people experience more “reciprocity anxiety” than other people do. “The scale taps two related components of reciprocity anxiety: avoidance, both of receiving favours/help/compliments and of feeling the need to reciprocate these things (factor 1) and distress, not only about not being able to reciprocate, but also at what others will think if you don’t (factor 2).” Those who scored higher on the “reciprocity anxiety” scale were more likely to say that if they were customers in a restaurant and the server gave them a “free money-off coupon,” they would be more likely to purchase the expensive dessert the server later recommended. The blog post author, Christian Jarrett, pointed out – and rightly so – that he’d have more confidence in the value of the scale if the research measured actual behavior rather than hypothetical behavior. Research idea Imagine if we could measure reciprocity anxiety in tourists before turning them loose on Paris’ Montmarte or Rome’s Spanish Steps. Would those tourists who scored high on the avoidance subscale work harder to avoid the friendship bracelet scammers than those who scored low? Of the tourists who get fished in, would those who scored higher on the distress subscale give more money than those who scored low? If you can’t get a research grant that would take you to Paris or Rome, you could do it on your own campus – returning the money to the marks during your debriefing, of course! Volunteer participants would take a battery of self-report measures included among those is the reciprocity anxiety scale, and then the participants are turned loose. As the participants leave the building, your confederate scammers pounce on them with string. Although, there may be a floor effect on the dependent variable. How much cash do students carry? In-class discussion After covering the norm of reciprocity, discuss this new study on reciprocity anxiety. Ask students to consider what behaviors the reciprocity anxiety subscales might predict, and then brainstorm some ways those predictions could be tested. ... View more

Before taking my first trip to Paris earlier this month, I was told to beware of some of the common street scams. I was targeted for the petition scam twice. The petition scam uses foot-in-the-door and, sometimes as a bonus, diverted attention. The scam In the petition scam, the thief approaches a likely mark with a clipboard in hand and asks, “Do you speak English?” When the mark says, “Yes,” the thief asks something like, “Would you sign this petition to support people who are deaf and mute?” When the mark says they are indeed willing, the thief hands over the clipboard and a pen. After the mark signs, the thief asks for a donation to support the cause. The money “donated” does not go to a cause other than the thief’s own. Foot-in-the-door research shows that, for example, people are more willing after signing a petition, to put ugly signs in their yards (Freedman & Fraser, 1966) or donate more money to a cause (Schwarzwald, Bizman, & Raz, 1983). Foot-in-the-door The foot-in-the-door technique starts with an innocuous question: “Do you speak English?” The mark’s response of “yes” is the foot getting in the door. The response also quickly identifies the mark as a tourist. Although, frankly, tourists are not that hard to spot. They’re the ones standing on sidewalks looking at maps. With their foot in the door, the thief aims to wedge it in even farther. The thief next asks the mark to sign a petition for a good cause. After all, who doesn’t want to support people who are deaf and mute? Most people have a pretty easy time signing their name to support a cause – and the door is opened even wider. And now comes the “sales pitch.” “Donate some money to the cause – you know, that cause that you just signed your name to supporting.” The thief hopes that the person wants to avoid the dissonance caused by saying one thing (“I support this cause”) but doing something else (“I’m not going to donate any money”) by actually handing over money. Pickpocket bonus Sometimes the petitioners work with an accomplice. While the mark holds the clipboard with one hand and signs with the other – distracted by the task and with their hands off their belongings, an accomplice rifles through the mark’s bags or pockets. If the mark donates money, the thief and their accomplice see which pocket or area in a bag the money comes from and follows the mark waiting for another opportunity to pickpocket. Distraction caused by a staged commotion by other accomplices makes for easy pickings. My experience The first petitioner who approached me in the Latin Quarter, asked if I spoke English. I said, “Yes.” She asked if I’d sign her petition to support people who are deaf and mute. That’s when alarm bells went off in my head. I’m in France. Who is she petitioning that she needs English-speakers? And “supporting” a group isn’t much of a petition. It helped that I was aware of the foot-in-the-door literature, so the only endings I could see were either being asked to donate money or being asked to put an ugly sign in my yard. I immediately declined her invitation to sign while simultaneously retaining a firm grip on my bag. When the second petitioner, this time on the Champs-Élysées, approached with the same “do you speak English” question, I said in my best French accent which, admittedly, is not very good, “Non.” She looked at me as if she didn’t believe me – probably because she just saw me holding a Paris guidebook written in English and because she heard me speaking English to my wife. Either way she knew I wasn’t going to fall for it and decided not to waste her time. I regret not finding a shady spot and watching these women in action. I guess the only choice I have is to go back to Paris. References Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0023552 Schwarzwald, J., Bizman, A., & Raz, M. (1983). The Foot-in-the-Door Paradigm: Effects of Second Request Size on Donation Probability and Donor Generosity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 9(3), 443–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167283093015 ... View more

Money matters. For entering U.S. collegians, the number one life goal—surpassing “helping others in difficulty,” “raising a family,” and 17 other aspirations—is “being very well off financially.” In the most recent UCLA “American Freshman” survey, 82 percent rated being very well off as “essential” or “very important.” Think of it as today’s American dream: life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness.   For human flourishing, fiscal fitness indeed matters . . . up to a point. In repeated surveys across nations, a middle-class income—and being able to control one’s life—beats being poor. Moreover, people in developed nations tend to be happier and more satisfied than those in the poorest of nations.   Beyond the middle-class level, we seem to have an income “satiation point,” at which the income-happiness correlation tapers off and happiness no longer increases. For individuals in poor countries, that point is close to $40,000; for those in rich countries, about $90,000, reports a new analysis of 1.7 million Gallup interviews by Andrew Jebb and colleagues. And consider: The average U.S.  per-person disposable income, adjusted for inflation, has happily tripled over the last 60 years, enabling most Americans to enjoy today’s wonderments, from home air conditioning to wintertime fresh fruit to smart phones. “Happily,” because few of us wish to return to yesteryear. Yet not that happily, because psychological well-being has not floated upward with the rising economic tide. The number of “very happy” adults has remained at 3 in 10, and depression has been on the rise. What triggers the diminishing psychological payoff from excess income? Two factors: Our human capacity for adaptation: Continual pleasures subside. Our tendency to assess our own circumstances by “social comparison” with those around us—and more often those above us. People with a $40,000 income tend to think $80,000 would enable them to feel wealthy—whereas those at $80,000 say they would need substantially more. Become a millionaire and move to a rich neighborhood, you still may not feel rich. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”   The outer limit of the wealth–well-being relationship also appears in two new surveys (by Grant Donnelly, Tianyl Zheng, Emily Haisley, and Michael Norton) of an international bank’s high net-worth clients. As you can see in figures I created from their data, having $2 million and $10 million are about the same, psychologically speaking. If wealth increases well-being only up to a point—and much evidence indicates that is so—and if extreme inequality is socially toxic (great inequality in a community or country predicts lower life quality and more social pathology), then could societies increase human flourishing with economic and tax policies that spread wealth?   Let’s make this personal: If earning, accumulating, and spending money increases our happiness only to a satiation point, then why do we spend our money for (quoting the prophet Isaiah) “that which is not bread” and our “labor for that which does not satisfy?” Quite apart from moral considerations, what’s to be lost by sharing our wealth above the income-happiness satiation point?   And if one is blessed with wealth, what’s to be gained by showering inherited wealth, above the satiation point, on our children? (Consider, too, another Donnelly and colleagues finding: Inherited wealth entails less happiness than earned wealth.)   Ergo, whether we and our children drive BMWs or Honda Fits, swim in our backyard pool or at the local Y, eat filet mignon or fish filet sandwiches, hardly matters. That fact of life, combined with the more important facts of the world’s needs, makes the case for philanthropy. ... View more

The British, American, and Australian press—and hundreds of millions of royal wedding viewers—were unexpectedly enthralled by Bishop Michael Curry’s 13.5 minutes of fame: “Stole the show” (Telegraph and Vox). “Electrifying” (New York Times). “Wholly un-British, amazing, and necessary” (Esquire). “Will go down in history” (Guardian). “His star turn is set to impact the Most Reverend Michael Curry’s life for years to come” (news.com.au) His gist: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love,” God’s love. “And when we do that, we will make of this old world, a new world.” A positive message—and an appealing synopsis of authentic Christianity—but why was it so effective? Why did it connect so well and capture media coverage? What persuasion principles did he illustrate that others—preachers, teachers, students, all speakers—might want to emulate? The power of repetition. Experiments leave no doubt: Repetition strengthens memory and increases belief. Repeated statements—whether neutral (“The Louvre is the largest museum in Paris”), pernicious (“Crooked Hillary”), or prosocial (“I have a dream”)—tend to stick to the mind like peanut butter. They are remembered, and they are more likely to be believed (sometimes even when repeated in efforts to discount them). Few will forget that Curry spoke of “love” (66 times, in fact—5 per minute). We would all benefit from emulating Curry’s example: Frame a single, simple message with a pithy phrase (“the power of love”). From this unifying trunk, the illustrative branches can grow. The power of speaking from the heart. A message rings authentic when it emanates from one’s own life experience and identity—when it has enough self-disclosure to be genuine, but not so much as to be self-focused. Curry, a slave descendant, speaking in an epicenter of White privilege, began and ended with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., and he told how his ancestors, “even in the midst of their captivity” embraced a faith that saw “a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” The power of speaking to the heart. My wife—an Episcopalian who has heard Curry’s preaching—has told me that his presence lends power beyond his written words. Curry was well prepared. But rather than safely reading his polished manuscript, he made eye contact with his audience, especially Prince Harry and Ms. Markle. He spoke with passion. His words aroused emotion. They spoke to troubled hearts in a polarized world. The power of vivid, concrete examples. The behavioral scientist in me wishes it weren’t true, but, alas, compelling stories and vivid metaphors have, in study after study, more persuasive power than truth-bearing statistics. No wonder each year, 7 in 10 Americans, their minds filled with images of school shootings and local murders, say there is more crime than a year ago—even while crime statistics have plummeted. William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic, The Elements of Style, grasped the idea: “If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in particulars.” And Curry, too, offered particulars, with simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence: When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty good room—plenty good room—for all of God’s children. When love is the way, we actually treat each other like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all. We are brothers and sisters, children of God. Brothers and sisters: that’s a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family. With such repeated, heart-filled, concrete words, perhaps all preachers and speakers could spare listeners the fate of Eutychus, who, on hearing St. Paul’s preaching, “sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead” (Acts 20:9). ... View more