PSYC 590
Survey of Social
Psychology I (Intrapersonal Processes)
2013-2014 Academic Year,
Term 1
Fridays, 1:00 – 4:00
Kenny 2405
Instructor:
Mark Schaller
Office: CIRS
4353
Office Hours:
By appointment
Phone:
604.822.2613
Email: schaller@psych.ubc.ca
Webpage:
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/psyc590.htm
The Purpose of the Course:
The purpose of this course is to provide you with an
overview of social psychological theories and research on attitudes and social
cognition. I've designed the course with
several goals in mind. The primary goal
is to provide you with a reasonably representative overview of contemporary
social psychological research on topics that fall within this broad domain of
inquiry. A second goal is to give you
some sense of the history of inquiry into these topics. A third goal is to give you a flavor for some
ways in which inquiry into these topics connects to several big
meta-theoretical zeitgeists within the psychological sciences. A fourth goal is to illustrate a set of
common cognitive mechanisms that contribute to a wide range of superficially
distinct social psychological phenomena.
A fifth goal is to identify some ways in which these processes have
implications that affect individuals' lives in ways that really matter. A sixth goal is to provide you with some
exposure to a variety of research methodologies that have been employed to
study these topics. A sixth goal is to challenge
you to think deeply and integratively about the
psychological processes we'll be covering, and to critically appraise the
research you'll be encountering.
Readings:
Each week's readings will cover some particular area
of inquiry. These readings are taken
from academic journals and books in psychology.
The vast majority of these readings are conceptual review articles that
provide overviews of many different empirical inquiries. A few additional articles offer examples of
empirical studies that are especially iconic, important, or interesting for
some reason. All readings will be
available to you in electronic form (pdf files), via the course website.
Class Time:
During class each week, I'll sometimes supplement the
readings by going into more detail about certain topics or studies not covered
in the readings. But I'm certainly not
going to be doing all the talking myself.
I'd like to spend the majority of class time critically discussing
relevant topics and readings. So, it's
important that you read the readings, that you come to class, and that you come
to class prepared to be thoughtful and talkative.
Article Presentation and Discussion-Leading:
At some point during the term, I'd like each of you to
spend a bit of time (15 – 30 minutes) presenting a summary of an empirical
article that isn't on the reading list, and leading us in a brief
discussion of that article. You'll
choose the article yourself, and the article you choose should meet the
following 3 criteria: (a) it was published in either Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology or in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; (b) it
was published within the past 5 years; and (c) it connects conceptually to the
topic area we're covering on the week that you present it. Your oral summary of the article can be brief
(and, ideally, lo-tech) so that we will actually have some time to discuss it
within the allotted timeframe. At the
beginning of the term, we'll figure out a schedule for when each of you is
expected to do this presentation.
Thought Papers:
I want you to write four
short "thought papers" over the course of the term. The goal of the each thought paper is to give
you an opportunity to take some of your initial reactions to course material,
and transform these thoughts into a written product of real intellectual
merit. You can approach these thought papers with any of a number of
rhetorical goals in mind. Your paper
could criticize a particular study, or take potshots at a particular theory or
a particular line of research, or identify important unanswered questions, or
offer some interesting resolution to some conceptual debate, or draw
connections between two superficially unrelated lines of research, or sketch
out a design for some novel experiment, or mull intelligently over troubling
issues... whatever. (I'll be happy to
chat with you informally about your ideas before you write your papers, to help
make sure that you're not going off in some crazy and/or unproductive
direction.) These papers shouldn't be
particularly long (no longer than 1500 words each, please). But they shouldn't be something that you just
slap together either. Your thought
papers should be coherent, original, insightful, and constructive. The ideal thought paper is not something that
meets it death when you hand it in to me; rather, it is the first written
expression of something (e.g., an integrative conceptual insight, a novel
theoretical analysis, a set of as-yet-untested hypotheses and methods that
might test them, etc.) that, eventually, somewhere down the road, leads to a
publishable piece of scholarship. I'll be marking each thought paper it on the basis of
how insightful it is, how scholarly it is, how intellectually stimulating it
is, how coherent and well-reasoned it is, and how successful it is at
accomplishing its apparent goal. Due
dates for the four thought papers are: October
7, October 28, November 18, and Dec 9.
(Note that these dates are all Mondays, and aren't days on which we're
scheduled to meet. You can hand in your
papers – hardcopies please – to my mailbox if you can't find me in person. You can hand them in early too, of course.)
Marks and grades:
Your final course grade will
be based upon an approximately equal weighting of the following two
ingredients: (1) your class
participation (actual attendance and, especially, your thoughtful contributions
to class discussions – including your
article-presentation-and-discussion-leading), and (2) the sum of the marks on
all of your thought papers.