Constructing Social Reality and Rev. Sun Myung Moon

When in the social psychology unit, I love showing the episode "Constructing Social Reality" from the Discovering Psychology series. This is available at learner.org. Among other things, it has Jane Elliott. But in one short burst of images dealing with cults, the episode shows a stadium of people getting "mass married" by Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. My students are amazed and disbelieving of this as a real event. This morning, on NPR, there was a story about Moon's most recent and possibly last mass wedding.

The story and images capture the immensity of the event and are worth examining within the context of our understanding of reality and cults. The article gives some nice context and insight into the process and the group.

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Psych in the news

Among Many Peoples, Little Genomic Variety. "But as analyses of genomes from dozens of distinct populations have rolled in -- French, Bantu, Palestinian, Yakut, Japanese -- that's not what scientists have found. Dramatic genome variation among populations turns out to be extremely rare."

Positive Is Negative. "Despite what all those self-help books say, repeating positive statements apparently does not help people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves. In fact, it tends to make them feel worse, according to new research."

In New York, Number of Killings Rises With Heat. Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.

Get a Life, Holden Caulfield. "Some critics say that if Holden is less popular these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents ... Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”

The return of trepanation? Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling a hole in your skull to relieve pressure on the brain, is now being studied as a possible treatment for dementia.

Keeping an Open Mind to Animal Homosexuality. 'Sure, it’s widely recognized that the animal kingdom is full of male-on-male and female-on-female action, from fruit flies on up to bottlenose dolphins and, of course, Homo sapiens. But though the origins and evolutionary consequences of homosexuality are varied, biologists tend to oversimplify such behavior.

Do you have what it takes to be a NASA pillownaut? Great story (with pictures like the one at the top) of how research is done. Imagine telling your kids that your role in helping space research was spent lying in bed!

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Psych in the news

Starting this week PitN will come out on a regular-ish schedule on Mondays and Thursdays. Like what you read? Post a comment below or send me (ashejones@gmail.com) a note! --Steve

"The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process." -- Great column from Nicholas Kristof that examines various issues such as group polarization, moral values, disgust and more. There are also links to yourmorals.org (where one can take online tests in areas such as personality, war and peace, and disgust) and civilpolitics.org on moral psychology.

“Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.” Another fascinating column by Kristof that looks at the work of Richard Nisbett (new book is Intelligence and How to Get It) on how groups such Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks "help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect."

"There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. In a fascinating new article in Psychological Science, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig turned the old aphorism on its head: One head can be nearly as good as two."(Scientific American)

From BoingBoing: "Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities."

I used excerpts from the book in class this past semester with great success and now someone has typed in all 50 with brief synopses. Excellent! Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (from Robert Cialdini et al.)

Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period. (via Freakonomics)

Jonah Lehrer looks at research that shows that the brains of kids with ADHD really are different (in terms of cortical thickness) but that this difference disappears by adolescence. He also makes reference to his New Yorker article from last month on self-control which was terrific.



Finally, Lehrer also discusses the above dancing video (also here if the link ist kaput) in relation to Stanley Milgram's experiment on conformity where he had confederates in New York City stop and look up and then compared the number of people who also stopped and looked. And the video below (also here) is a modern re-creation of that experiment.

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Milgram: What Would We Do Now?

Michael Britt, on his most recent podcast "The Psych Files" goes into historical and modern detail about the original Milgram study on obedience. Given the widespread knowledge of the obedience study, despite ethical restraints, and despite changes in society, how might a 2008 study replicating the original study come out? Would we be more or less obedient or about the same? How would the new study be handled by the researchers and university? What strange coincidence occurred with Milgram's heart attack and death.

Oh, would you like some great resources including a PowerPoint to help teach the Milgram obedience study? If so, check out Dr. Britt's newest podcast and page link.

There are also links to books, videos, ABC television demonstrations of a replication, other additional resources and much more. If you are into social psychology, ethics, or just like people to be obedient, this is a great podcast to check out.

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Using 12 Angry Men in Intro Psych

Looking for a meaningful post-AP or year-end activity? I have had a lot of success in the past with the movie 12 Angry Men, particularly as a vehicle to tie together many varied strands of social psychology. If you haven't seen the film, it's a 90-minute real-time depiction of the deliberation of a jury in a murder trial. The initial vote in the jury room is 11-1 guilty, and that's when the fun starts. Among the topics that you can illustrate here are minority influence, groupthink, group polarization, conformity, obedience, stereotype, scapegoat, persuasion and more. You can also bring in concepts from other units as well such as belief perseverance ("I still think he's guilty") and the concerns of eyewitness testimony.

There are many resources on the Internet for building a lesson plan around this film. Here is an interesting one that uses bingo cards for students to identify when they identify social psych concepts in the film. There's also a nice list of quotations from the film that match those concepts. Here's another one, a little old, but again it covers these same social psych concepts. If you have access there's a nice series of journal articles in the October 2007 issue of Negotiation Journal, including a satire written from the point of the view of the defendant who had been found not guilty by the jury but who admits he actually did it. And this site has mini-bios of each juror, along with a numbered photo of the group (handy since only two names are exchanged, and the only in the penultimate line of the film.)

[Long ago when teaching civics I had my students create the next day's newspaper based on this film, with various "reporters" covering the trial itself, reactions from the attorneys, neighbors, families, witnesses, jurors, etc. Some wise guy usually would include a scoop interview with the killer who admits he did it. Too bad I didn't think to get that published then!]

If you are planning on giving a written assignment, however, please also be aware that there are numerous sites where students can find term papers and other work on the subject. That aside, I think it's an excellent movie that will allow your students to put their knowledge in action as well as appreciate a fine example of American cinema.

How about you -- have you used 12 Angry Men? How so?

EDIT: Photo replaced (it didn't load when I viewed it the 2nd time.)

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Great source for social psych

I was looking for an example or two to illustrate a social psych concept when I stumbled upon this treasure trove. Wow! This site, Examples Illustrating Social Psychological Concepts, is edited by Jon Mueller, Professor of Psychology at North Central College, Naperville, IL. There are seemingly endless links to examples of social psych concepts in many different formats. Need a bystander effect video clip? Another fundamental attribution error example? Cartoons? Audio clips? They're all here.

As I browsed around I realized this is a smaller part of an even bigger site, Resources for Teaching Social Psychology. Here is even more for your social psych teaching needs: activities, web projects, lectures, and much much more. I'm off to change my lesson plans for today! Be sure to post in the comments below how your liked this site and what lessons/example/activities worked for you.

UPDATE: I got an e-mail from Professor Mueller today and he would like me to share this as well:

"I just wanted to mention that I also send out a free, monthly email newsletter with the site in which I include new and newly discovered resources and ideas for teaching social psych and related topics. Your readers can subscribe at

https://lists.noctrl.edu/sympa/info/socialpsy-teach

You can also read previous issues there in the Archive.

Also, I have collected lots of links for my intro psych course here that you are welcome to browse and use

http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/100/100SCHED.HTM

Take care,

Jon"

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Psych in the news

My bookmarks are bursting at the seams! Many of these great links come via the incredible Mind Hacks blog featuring Vaughan Bell-- be sure to check it out regularly. Here's a few articles to get your week started:

• Great interview of Judith Rich Harris by The Frontal Cortex's Jonah Lehrer. Harris was the textbook editor who put the psychology world in a tizzy in 1998 with the release of her book The Nurture Assumption, which challenged the standing belief that parents play a major role in the shaping of their children's personality. Wrong, said Harris, and she pointed out the flaws in a number of research studies to back her assertions. The book is now out in an expanded edition and is a definite must-read for psychology teachers.
• Jonah Lehrer also writes about what we can learn from how the brains of babies work. The article features psychologist Allison Gopnik who has a forthcoming book called The Philosophical Baby (with its own YouTube intro here).
• NPR's Robert Kulwich does a piece on how language shapes thinking.
• The Obama administration is using applied psychology to get people to want the "change [they] can believe in." Vaughan at Mind Hacks wonders where the skepticism is to this approach.
• Discover Magazine looks at The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences Between Our Left and Right Brains.
• Is sex addiction an excuse, not a disease?
• Nature looks at how the MRI is changing the way we view the brain.
• Has the APA been slow to act when its members have been involved in torture?
• Epilepsy not as a storm in the brain, but an anti-storm?
• New Scientist looks at choice blindness -- how do we know what we want?
• An awesome (but long, naturally) look by the New Yorker at how drugs like Adderall are being used off-label to help non-ADHD people do better than before.
• A lecture on the connection between the fMRI and the four humours (!).

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Contagious Dishonesty: One Bad Apple Can Ruin the Barrel

What makes unethical behavior contagious? A series of experiments by Duke professor Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) and others published in the current issue of Psychological Sciences testing the conditions under which students would cheat found social norms can exert a strong influence over behavior. An article on this study in Newsweek says the findings reveal that "our inner moralist doesn't really want to cheat. Yet it also appears that dishonesty can be contagious—if we witness one of our own committing the public act of dishonesty."

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An inside look at Iran

I realize that the follow post may not be directly applicable to your psychology class, but let me implore you to think about including this in a social psych or cultural psych unit ... or at the very least, share this with the world history or world geography teachers you know.

In January I happened to TiVo a PBS called Rick Steves' Iran. You may have seen or heard of Rick before -- he's a travel writer who's done many books and TV shows on travel, particularly Europe. Anyhow, this show was special, as he was allowed a rare chance to visit several cities in Iran and film the visit for a special show.

The show is amazing! I had never seen such recent footage of Iran and on the varied kind of people who live there, as well as the historical sites. I think as Americans we tend to get the idea that Iran is an evil country but the people that Steves met were warm and welcoming. He also does a nice job of interspersing the history of Iran and especially of US/Iran relations, including the US role in the establishment of the shah in the '50s and the hostage crisis/rise to power of the ayatollahs in the late '70s. At the same time, he makes clear that his visit is officially allowed by the government and that a government official accompanies throughout his visit to monitor and if needed censor the scenes that he captured.

This week I learned that the one hour DVD of this video is available for $5 (instead of the normal $19.95) for those who agree to show this to other groups of people, and of course this means teachers. Orders have to be in by March 31, though, so act fast.

You can get a full background on the special at http://www.ricksteves.com/iran/ and also watch a 4 minute preview there.

And no, I get nothing from this, just passing the word about something I think is terrific.

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Frozen at Grand Central Station

This is a fantastic video clip I found last year of over 200 people freezing for five minutes at Grand Central Station. The crowd reaction is amazing. While I love the clip, I have yet to find a good spot within the Social Psychology unit to put it. Any suggestions??? Please click the comment button below to leave your thoughts.

The full 2 minute video can be found at a number of sites including:

http://improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U_kp1saG-g
http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html

For similar videos go to the Improv Everywhere website and look through the Mission Highlights section. Before showing any of these clips to your classes, please make sure you preview them as some include some inappropriate segments. Please contact me if you find other clips worthy of classroom use and we can post them on this blog.

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