The Biases assignment is your final for this . Using the skills and topics we talked about during the semester will be helpful for you in completing this assignment. The purpose of this assignment has two parts. First, I want to encourage you to find and choose a bias that you might encounter on a daily basis. By focusing on this bias, you will learn more about how it works and how we are impacted by it. Moreover, you will see how you are personally impacted by the bias. Second, I want you to look at research that scientists and social scientist do to figure out why biases/how biases function. By looking at research, you will be exposed to some of what it takes to make scientific assertions or predictions (e.g., saying why we do things/why something impacts us and what will happen in the future). It is important for us as consumers of research, both in and outside of , to become familiar with how a study works so we can critically assess information given to us. Not all studies are the same, but many follow the scientific method.
Instructions:1. For your biases project, visit the Wikipedia page listed in the Blackboard folder for this assignment. Choose ONE bias that is either within the belief, decision-making and behavioral biases, the social biases, or the memory errors and biases section. This is the bias you will be writing your paper about. If you need help narrowing down a choice please send me an email.
2. Then, once you have chosen your bias, please submit the bias you are choosing by filling out the “Biases topic” assignment (10 points total). [late submissions will receive 2 points deducted per day late]
3. After you have chosen and submitted your bias you want to write about, find 3 empirical articles that study this topic. This can be related to psychology or to the field you are interested in. You will need to read all 3.
a. Articles MUST be empirical articles found either through Google Scholar, the library database, or through sites such as PSYCINFO or other research article databases.
b. You CANNOT use: newspaper articles, blogs, websites, social media, news websites, books, articles from our class, or anything that is not peer reviewed (we will go over this in class). If you have questions about if your article counts, please send me an email.
4. Once you have picked 3 articles, submit those articles and a brief summary to the “Article summary” assignment (30 points total). Due October 23rd by 11:59pm [late submissions will receive 5 points deducted per day late]
5. After submitting the articles, choose 1 article that you liked the best. If you are having a hard time choosing, please send me and email and I can help you narrow it down.
6. Final paper: using your article, answer the following questions in an essay format. Do not copy and paste the questions and answer them as bullet points. Please use Arial font, single space, 11-point font. Please make sure you indent your paragraphs and do not use more than one space between the paragraphs of each question/topic. The paper must be at least one full page but no more than three pages. (70 points total):
a. What was the purpose of the study? (e.g., why did they do it?) (5 points)
b. Who were the participants? (e.g., were they college students, athletes, etc., and provide the percentage of male, female, and any other genders that were surveyed in the study). (5 points)
c. How did they do the study? (e.g., did they talk to participants over the phone, did they give out paper surveys, did they have participants do a survey online, etc.) (5 points)
d. What kinds of measures or tests did the participants complete? (e.g., demographics questions, an implicit biases test, etc.) (5 points)
e. What were the findings? (e.g., what were the? Was it consistent with what the researchers thought?) (10 points)
f. What did you think about the study? (10 points)
i. Was anything surprising?
ii. Do you think the results make sense?
iii. Did you think the study was interesting?
iv. What would you think if you saw the results broadcast on the news? Would you believe it?
g. Next answer some questions about your experience with this particular bias (30 points)
i. What are some ways (at least 2) that you engage in this bias? (e.g., thinking that one person who likes onions is just like all the others who like onions – your response should be more thoughtful than this)
ii. What are some ways (at least 2) you can prevent engaging in this bias?
iii. What did you learn about yourself in this process? This part has no prompt, but you will be graded by how thoughtful your response is. If you are unsure what this looks like, please send me and email.
Topic choice for Biases Paper is “Bizarreness Effecr”
Artilce Summaries for Biases Paper
Yu, C., & Shen, H. (2020). Bizarreness of Lucid and Non-Lucid Dream: Effects of Metacognition. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2946.
In this article, the authors Yu and Shen have discussed how the dreams are characterized by the primary consciousness, bizarreness and cognitive deficits, this, according to these authors, is defined as the lack of metacognition. The two authors have described lucid dreaming as the type of consciousness state during which the dreamer is set to be aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming, without leaving the state of sleep. Brain research that has been carried out indicates that Lucid dreaming shares some common neural mechanisms with metacognition like having self-reflection. In this article, the authors have noted the difference in bizarreness between Lucid dreaming and non-Lucid dreaming being that, Lucid dreaming retains a higher order consciousness functions which include metacognition as compared to non-Lucid.
Toyota, H. (2021). THE BIZARRENESS EFFECT AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE.
The author of this article carried out the study examining the relationship between emotional intelligence and the probability of the effects of bizarreness. The authors interviewed the participants on the rate of degree of strange feelings that is elicited by sentences as well as participants in the image condition that were interviewed in the rate of vividness concerning the image elicited by sentences. In this article, it was realized that the level of emotional intelligence is negatively correlated with the recall performance of bizarre sentences for participants that were in emotion condition.
Gounden, Y., Cerroti, F., & Nicolas, S. (2017). Secondary distinctiveness effects: Orthographic distinctiveness and bizarreness effects make independent contributions to memory performance. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 58(1), 9-14.
In this article, the authors found out that the secondary distinctiveness effect means that those items that are usual are compared to one’s general knowledge that is stored in permanent memory are remembered in a better way than the common items. Two forms of secondary distinctiveness were studied in this research, these are the bizarreness effects and the orthographic distinctiveness effect.
