Humanities Homework Help

Applied Final Project: A Fly on the Wall – Social Psychology Around You

For this project, you will be observing your fellow human beings in a public space (for example, a grocery store, a park, at your workplace). Additionally (or alternatively) because COVID-19 is upon us and gatherings and outings are more limited – your own home may serve for a base of observation for this assignment. If you find that, because of the pandemic restrictions you are not able to sit and observe human interaction and behavior long enough, you may use your observations of characters in film, TV shows, or YouTube videos for this experiment, but the preference is for “real world” situations. Do not put yourself in harms way to do this assignment. The movie/Youtube/tv show thing is a viable alternative.

Your project will include:

1. A title page: Your title page will include your name, course information, your email address and a unique and interesting title for your observation. You will also list the site(s) of your observations here.
2. Goals: Start off this assignment by listing 2-3 goals for your observation. What will you be keeping your eyes out for? Maybe you are looking at gender differences in social behavior. Maybe you are wanting to observe social behaviors between members of different ethnic/racial groups. Maybe you are looking at how age seems to factor into people’s behavior. You might list your goals in terms of verbs such as discover, investigate, uncover, detect, or learn. This goals section will be about one page.
3. Research question: While you are observing, you should have a question or questions in mind – hypotheses based on what you have read/learned in class. For instance, if you are looking at gender differences and are using Youtube videos as your base of operations, you might wonder if male US Olympians react differently to public victories than female US Olympians do. If you are observing in a grocery store, you might ask or wonder if there is an apparent effect of age on one’s likelihood to engage in prosocial or altrustic behavior (like allowing someone to get ahead in line or offering to reach something for someone). Does increased or decreased crowd size seem to help or hurt the performance of your favorite musician (as based on life performances you have seen around the web). If you are at a park, you might ask what demographic is wearing masks or doing a better job at maintaining a six-foot distance? I won’t give too many examples, I want you to be creative, but just to let you know that there really is no wrong answer here. Your research question about a page or a page and a half. If you find you don’t have enough fodder to make a full page or if you worried your observation may be “lite” on material, you can always make more than one observation at more than one site answering different research questions.
4. Abstracts: Find five abstracts from social psychological articles relating to your research question/observation. You may copy and paste each abstract into the paper, but properly quote and cite it. But don’t stop here. After you have pasted each abstract, you should explain (in your own words) how the study being described informs the research question(s) you are pursuing. This may be several pages long depending on how long your abstracts are. I’d say maybe 3-4 pages. If its a little shorter or a little longer it’s okay.
5. Introduce the setting: Here, discuss the setting(s) in which you will conduct your observation(s). Provide some detail so that the reader can get a true sense of the venue and understand how the setting could have affected the behaviors you are writing about. This might be one page.
6. Observational sessions: Here, detail and describe the behaviors you observe. You should might reach for 1 to 3 sessions in your setting. Or one session in multiple settings. I’m flexible here since I know going out and making observations isn’t the easiest thing to do in the world these days. Shoot for 2 pages, going over is fine.
7. Results: In a results section, use your observations to answer your research questions you posed earlier in the paper. Explain why and how you drew these conclusions based on the behaviors you observed. Include theories from social psychology that support or explain your results. Discuss the influence of your own experiences on your results. I’d shoot for at least 2 pages here. Going over is fine.
8. References: In this section, list the references you referenced or quoted in your paper. Add a bibliography of books, articles, and Web sites that you recommend regarding your observation. This will be about one page. Maybe a little less.

Total, this assignment will have about 11-14 pages. Label your sections clearly, use proper 1 inch margins all the way around, practice APA formatting