psychology paper due tonight

Short Writing Assignment # 1

PSYC – Intergroup Relations Summer 2015

The broad intention of the paper is to explore experiences in your own life where stereotypes and/or prejudice played an important role. You will describe and use knowledge from social psychology to explore specific incidents in which your own behaviour was influenced by stereotypes or prejudice and another in which you believe that stereotypes or prejudice played a role in how someone else treated you. You will consider two incidents – one where you acted on the basis of your own stereotypes/prejudice and one where you were the target of someone’s stereotypes/prejudice.

Content guidelines (please follow carefully)

1. You must start with discrete and specific incidents or events that you were personally involved in (not something you have heard about from others). Describe the incident or event, but be very brief! The primary task is not the description of the incident, but to discuss how social psychology can help us to understand the incident and the actions, thoughts and feelings of the people involved.

2. For each incident, be clear about what the ingroup and the outgroup are (exactly what group is the target of the stereotypes/ prejudice).

3. Be sure to explain exactly how each incident shows evidence of stereotypes or prejudice (not just a case of someone being nice or mean to another person). This means you need to be clear about what these concepts mean and what qualifies as a stereotyping and as prejudice.

4. You should provide some comparison of the two incidents. In what ways were they similar or different? How does the experience of being the holder of stereotypes feel different from being the target? It is important to consider information from the course in making these comparisons.

5. You should discuss connections between the science of stereotyping/prejudice and your own experiences. This discussion should make up the bulk of your paper. Here are some ideas for the types of connections you could explore (note that you will not have room to discuss all of these questions, they are simply provided as possible ways that you can connect the science of stereotyping/prejudice to your own experiences). Please feel free to consider other ways of making this connection that are not listed here.

· You may want to explore the role of the specific context in which the incidents took place. Were the specific stereotypes relevant to the particular context or situation? Would the same person (group) be treated on the bases of these stereotypes in another situation or context? Would the level of prejudice have been different in another situation?

· You may want to contrast your experience during the actual incident with your thoughts and feelings when you think about it now. When it happened, how aware were you of the role of group memberships in what occurred? If you were aware, how did it make you feel? If you were not aware at the time, why do you think you did not notice? Do you think that the person (people) you were interacting with were aware of the importance of group memberships? If so, what makes you think they were aware? If not, why? Does your assessment of these things match what we know from the scientific study of these processes ?

· You may want to consider what other ideas, concepts, theories, research, etc . from the course (beyond the specific topics of stereotypes and prejudice) can help us understand these specific incidents.

Writing guidelines (please follow carefully)

1. It is very important that this be a social psychology paper. You must make direct reference to concepts, ideas and/or research in social psychology.

2. Do not assume that the reader is familiar with social psychology. You need to provide enough description that a layperson would understand the ideas you are presenting. Social psychological terms should be explained.

3. Although this paper does not require citing outside sources (material not included in lecture or readings), they might be helpful in formulating your arguments. Whether you are relying on outside sources or not, you must cite all your sources (including the class text or readings and the lectures) appropriately using APA format.

4. This is a short paper. Part of the task is to write succinctly and to make the tough decisions about what to leave out. Edit your work! Remove or improve unnecessary and unclear writing. You can often shorten a paper by as much as 25% by editing sentence by sentence to tighten grammar and structure. Tightening up “wordy” writing allows you more space to focus on quality content.

5. On this first paper, you will not be officially graded on “composition” (grammar, sentence structure, spelling etc.). However you should edit your paper to make sure it meets high standards for composition. Regardless of whether marks are “taken off” , poor organization, grammatical errors, etc. can make it difficult to understand and evaluate your ideas, which will affect your grade. Additionally, if you have not done your best in these areas, our feedback will be less helpful to you in improving your second paper, as we will be telling you things you already know.

6. I strongly suggest that you share your paper with a friend/family member (who is not studying psychology), and have them indicate any areas where clarity could be improved. If English is your second language, it may be especially helpful for you to share your paper with a native English speaker. However, keep in mind that the

paper must be entirely YOUR WORK – plagiarism and or/ academic dishonesty of any sort will not be tolerated.

Paper Formatting

1. The body of the paper (everything except for title page and Reference List) must not exceed 1200 words. If your paper is longer than this, the grader will stop reading at 1200 words (this will likely have an adverse effect on your mark!)

2. Please use APA style . For example:

a. Papers must be double-spaced, with 1-inch margins and in 12-pt font.

b. Pages must be numbered in the top right corner (including page 1)

c. Citations in text and the reference list must conform to APA style.

Note: There are several appropriate ways to cite class lectures. I suggest as a public lecture: Droogendyk, L. (year, month). Title of lecture.

3. You DO NOT need to include an abstract.

Paper Submission

· The file should be Word (.doc or .docx) or “.rtf” format.