PSYC2520 treats social psychology's landmark studies not as historical curiosities but as tools for understanding real, current social phenomena — why people conform, how attitudes actually change, and how prejudice operates even without conscious intent.
Conformity, obedience, and persuasion
PSYC2520 revisits classic studies — Asch's conformity experiments, Milgram's obedience studies, and Cialdini's persuasion principles — applying their findings to contemporary situations: workplace groupthink, susceptibility to misinformation, and marketing/advertising tactics that exploit well-documented psychological principles.
Prejudice, stereotyping, and applied intervention
The course examines the psychology of prejudice and stereotyping, including implicit bias research, and studies evidence-based interventions — intergroup contact theory, perspective-taking exercises — that have shown genuine, if modest, effectiveness at reducing prejudice, distinguishing these from popular but less-supported approaches.
Key topics in PSYC2520
- Classic conformity and obedience research: Asch and Milgram studies
- Cialdini's principles of persuasion applied to marketing and influence
- Implicit bias and the psychology of stereotyping and prejudice
- Intergroup contact theory and evidence-based prejudice-reduction interventions
- Applying social psychology to real-world phenomena: misinformation, social movements
- Critically evaluating popular but weakly-supported prejudice-reduction approaches
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Worked example: applying Cialdini's principles to recognize a marketing tactic
- Marketing tactic: "Only 3 rooms left at this price!"
- Principle at work: Scarcity — Cialdini's research shows perceived scarcity increases desire and urgency, independent of the item's actual value
- Related principle: Social proof — "500 people booked this in the last 24 hours" leverages the tendency to follow others' behavior as a decision-making shortcut
- Lesson: Recognizing these principles in action helps consumers make more deliberate decisions rather than being unconsciously nudged by well-documented psychological triggers
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Frequently asked questions
Stanley Milgram's studies found that a majority of ordinary participants, when instructed by an authority figure, were willing to administer what they believed were increasingly severe (even potentially dangerous) electric shocks to another person, despite that person's apparent distress — the study revealed the surprising and unsettling degree to which situational authority pressure can override individual moral judgment. PSYC2520 teaches this finding as important beyond its historical shock value because it has direct application to understanding real-world phenomena like organizational misconduct, where individuals in hierarchical structures sometimes participate in or fail to stop unethical actions specifically because of perceived pressure to defer to authority or established procedure — recognizing this dynamic is a first step toward designing organizational structures and training that actively counteract this predictable, well-documented tendency toward destructive obedience.
Implicit bias refers to attitudes or stereotypes that affect judgments and behavior in an automatic, unconscious way, operating outside a person's conscious awareness or control — a person can genuinely, consciously reject prejudiced beliefs while still exhibiting measurable implicit biases on tests like the Implicit Association Test, which measures automatic associations between concepts (like race) and evaluations (like "good" or "bad") based on response speed patterns. PSYC2520 teaches this distinction because it explains a genuine puzzle: how well-intentioned people who sincerely reject prejudice can still sometimes act in subtly biased ways — in hiring decisions, in interpersonal interactions — without conscious intent to discriminate, since implicit associations can shape split-second judgments and behaviors that consciously held beliefs don't fully override. This is why prejudice-reduction interventions increasingly target these automatic, unconscious processes (through structured, deliberate practices like blind resume review) rather than assuming that a person's sincere conscious commitment to fairness alone is sufficient to eliminate biased outcomes.