Assignment task:
1. Part of good social psychological research is recognizing your own perspectives and biases and how they may influence your research. Historically, psychology has had times that this was done very effectively and other times this has been done very poorly. As such, for this first discussion prompt, I want you to discuss what perspectives and biases you have that would influence how you will process this course and your education more generally.
2. Psychology is often seen as suffering from a problem of using WEIRD participants (WEIRD = Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). For this question, I want you to reflect on your own behaviors and thinking. What do you do / think / say / etc. that reflects you as an individual the most? What likely reflects your humanity more generally?
3. So far, every discussion prompt has asked you to think about yourself and your background. Obviously, as this is the chapter on the self, this is going to be the focus again. What positive illusions have you had about yourself (and why)? What convinced you that it was indeed an illusion? How did it change your actions moving forward?
4. One of the reasons New Year's Resolutions fail tie into failures of self-regulation. Please highlight advertising that attempts to capitalize on resolutions (either new year's or otherwise) and look into the program (and post a link in your reply). Based on what you have learned so far, how successful will this program be and why? Would it be likely to succeed or fail?
5. Counterfactual thinking is an under researched area of social cognition. Using events from the news, please select a target (to assess counterfactuals on), the situation (with enough detail for someone to understand your explanation), and explain what counterfactual thinking may be present in the situation and why.