What Would You Do?: Social Psychology

This lesson's focus is to help students understand that complex and varied interactions among individuals, groups, cultures, and nations contribute to the dynamic nature of personal identity. For this lesson I will focus more on social psychology and bring in aspects of student's day-to-day lives. I will start by giving a short lecture on social psychology theory on attitudes, behavior, and the relationship between the two. Next, we will go into social influence: the power of a situation, the effects that others’ presence has on individual behavior, how group dynamics influence behavior, and how an individual influences a group. We will watch an episode of “What Would You Do?" We would also discuss stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, focusing on how each of these are present and seen in specific demographics: sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic, minorities, and age. I would use media to showcase how this is represented and have students discuss if this is an accurate representation of their age group and how they feel about that representation. As an assessment, I want students to create their own social experiment. This can be presented in any way they desire (video, poster, essay, etc.). Not only should they describe their experiment in-depth, but also why they chose that experiment, what they want to see come of it, and what their hypothesis is on the outcome.