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INSTRUCTOR'S GUIDE Faculty Guide Evolutionary accounts of helping are controversial and easy to misunderstand. For example, it is easy for students to see environmental selection pressure as an intelligent and good process (i.e., to commit the naturalistic fallacy) or to believe that kin selection implies that our genes somehow know their relatives. It may be useful at this point to have students review the bio-fallacies from the biopsychology unit. Why Do People Often Fail To Help? Faculty Guide: Decision Model of Helping
Faculty Note: In this activity, a visual model of the Latené & Darley decision tree is presented and students can click on the various nodes to get information about the factors that influence that point in the decision process. Faculty Guide It may be worth noting that when applied to stereotypes and prejudice, the belief in a just world helps validate and maintain the status quo. If there is unequal distribution of wealth across groups, belief in a just world will result in justifications that support that unequal distribution. Rather than motivating change, just world beliefs preserve existing patterns of discrimination. Faculty Guide Building on this idea, Eliot Aronson and his colleagues (1978) developed an intervention for reducing prejudice in classrooms. Their jigsaw technique first involves breaking assignments into pieces and giving one piece to each student. The students then have to work together across race and economic lines in order to complete the assignment. When compared to traditional classrooms, jigsaw classrooms produce significantly more cooperation and less prejudice. Stereotypes and self-fulfilling prophecies Faculty Guide Building on this idea, Eliot Aronson and his colleagues (1978) developed an intervention for reducing prejudice in classrooms. Their jigsaw technique first involves breaking assignments into pieces and giving one piece to each student. The students then have to work together across race and economic lines in order to complete the assignment. When compared to traditional classrooms, jigsaw classrooms produce significantly more cooperation and less prejudice. Faculty Guide: Impression and Expression
Faculty Note: In this activity, which is based on Tajfel's classic research, students are asked to participate in an "experiment" in which they simply indicate their preferences among a series of abstract paintings by two fictional artists (e.g., Azenour and Zabriski). After evaluating ten pictures (two at a time) they are told that they fall into the group that tends to prefer Zabriski. They are then asked to think about what other Zabriski fans are like, and to rate individuals who fall into each of the groups on traits that vary in social desirability. After they complete the ratings, their responses are totaled. What should happen is that the students will tend to rate ingroup members more favorably than outgroup members. After getting the results, the accompanying text debriefs the students, pointing out that neither Zabriski nor Azenour are real artists and that they were randomly assigned to the Zabriski group. Faculty Guide: Impression and Expression
Faculty Note: In this activity, which is based on Tajfel's classic research, students are asked to participate in an "experiment" in which they simply indicate their preferences among a series of abstract paintings by two fictional artists (e.g., Azenour and Zabriski). After evaluating ten pictures (two at a time) they are told that they fall into the group that tends to prefer Zabriski. They are then asked to think about what other Zabriski fans are like, and to rate individuals who fall into each of the groups on traits that vary in social desirability. After they complete the ratings, their responses are totaled. What should happen is that the students will tend to rate ingroup members more favorably than outgroup members. After getting the results, the accompanying text debriefs the students, pointing out that neither Zabriski nor Azenour are real artists and that they were randomly assigned to the Zabriski group. Faculty Guide: Reducing Prejudice
Faculty Note: In this interactive table, students can learn more about the effects that cooperation, contact, critical thinking, and empathy have on prejudice. Faculty Guide: Prisoner's Dilemma
Faculty Note: In this game, students are asked to pretend that they are the campaign manager for a presidential candidate. As such, they always have two goals in mind. First, they want to secure the party's nomination for their candidate. Second, they want the party to have as much momentum going into the general election as possible. As the campaign manager, their task is to decide in each primary state whether to "go negative" and run attack ads on their primary opponents. Conventional wisdom is that negative ads are highly effective at distinguishing their candidate from the rest of the field, but they have a negative impact on the public's perception of the party and kill turnout. In contrast, positive ads have the advantage of making people feel good about the party, but they do not distinguish the students' candidate from the rest of the primary field. So their task is two-fold: win the party's nomination and gain enough momentum (i.e., enough votes for the party) to win the general election. The game itself consists of ten trials (primaries). On each trial, the students must decide whether to "go negative." Their opponent (i.e., the computer) also makes a similar decision. The computer responds with a tit-for-tat strategy. If the students go negative, the computer goes negative. Conversely, if the students stay positive, the computer stays positive. What should become clear as the students play the game is that in attempting to maximize their own personal gain, their choices lead to collective failure (i.e., their candidate wins the primary, but the party will lose the election). The text that accompanies the interaction draws attention to a variety of social traps (e.g., tragedy of the commons, pollution, contributing to public television, studying with other students when the exam is graded on a competitive curve) and presents information about how to minimize the chances of collective failure (e.g., members of groups who have a strong identity with the collective are less likely to defect). |
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