allied psy308 modules 1

Directions: Please compose answers to the questions below. Each response to a question or sub-question should be at least one paragraph in length, which should consist of five to seven sentences.

1. What does social psychology have in common with folk wisdom and philosophy? How does social psychology differ from both folk wisdom and philosophy?

2. Compare the self-esteem approach and the social cognition approach in terms of the motivations assumed to underlie human behavior.

3. Based on your text’s account of research on self-fulfilling prophecies, explain why some children in a class might perform better than others even if the children are all of similar ability levels.

4. Few would disagree that human aggression is a very pressing social problem that leads to violent criminal acts and that it is important to understand the causes of aggression before we can intervene to reduce it. How would a social psychologist approach this phenomenon? How would a social psychologist’s approach differ from the approach of a personality psychologist or a sociologist?

5. Suppose that in a restaurant, a waiter grows impatient with a customer, rolls his eyes, taps his pencil impatiently on his order book, and finally snaps, “I haven’t got all day, you know.” Compare and contrast how a personality psychologist and a social psychologist would attempt to explain such behavior.

6. A developmental psychologist who used the correlational method found that there was a positive correlation between children’s self-esteem and their academic achievement. First, what does a positive correlation mean in this case? Second, how might these results be explained?

7. “What is the relationship between viewing violence on the one hand and behaving aggressively on the other hand?” How might an observational researcher, a correlational researcher, and an experimental researcher answer that question?

8. Describe three different ways that experimental social psychologists can enhance their faith in the external validity of their experiments. Explain how social psychologists can increase the internal validity of their experiments.