This is a short (5-7 full page TYPED) paper consisting of a thoughtful analysis of some social psychological issues. The choice of topic area is up to you, but will most likely be developed from some idea that you have learned about in this class. You need only to look at your work/personal/academic life in order to come up with viable topics. For example, the lecture and reading on obedience may bring to mind some situation where you conformed to someone’s wishes without really feeling that it was the right thing to do. What do social psychological theories have to say about why you did that? Or maybe the reading and lecture about the social nature of self-image will get you contemplating your own self-consciousness (or lack thereof) and cause you to reflect upon situations in which you feel especially self-aware.
Whatever your topic choice, you must enhance your discussion by using the information found in TWO social psychology journal articles. I would expect you to find articles relevant to your topic, and to summarize the theoretical basis and experimental procedures described in the articles. The major journals in the field are The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, The Journal of Applied Social Psychology, The Journal of Applied Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Many empirical sources can also be found online. Other journals, such as those found in the human resources, clinical, or educational fields, might also be used, depending upon your topic. (NOTE: Magazines for laypersons, even those such as “Psychology Today”, are not appropriate as a primary source for this assignment. Websites that merely provide information about a topic, as opposed to websites containing research articles, are also unacceptable.)
The general format of a typical paper would be to spend a page or so discussing your topic of interest: Why does it intrigue you? What have you seen in your own life or in the observations of the social world that relate to this topic? Then you would spend two or three pages summarizing the articles you have found. What is the general history of the topic in the research literature? What do the authors of the articles you are using hypothesize about the topic? How do they test their hypotheses? Who are the participants in the study, and what is the methodology that was used? What are the results, and what are the implications of those results? You do not have to spend a great deal of time discussing the statistics that were utilized in the research, just summarizing the results is fine. In the final page or pages of the paper,relate what you have read in the articles to the observations or thoughts you have had about the topic. What have you learned?
