Social Psychology

I took this class twice. First I audited it when it was offered first a few years ago. My attraction to attending this class was the 'Day of Compassion' assignment at the end of the class, where the winner was going to be invited to meet his holiness Dalai Lama at Stanford University in the USA. So, with a lot of curiosity, I started to audit this class! I first decided to audit this class, as, there were many peer-reviewed assignments that I did not feel like attempting, while I am exploring the class material. This class totally kept me engaged. Learned about many psychological research and experiments that sparked my deep curiosity in the field of social psychology. I found lectures also very engaging. In this first class, the 'Day of Compassion' essay winner was a doctor from India and her work was inspiring. You can read about it all online, if you search for it, you will find it!

Well, then, a few years later, I got an opportunity to be a community mentor for this class. At that time I decided to do all the peer-reviewed assignments and completed this class and earned a certificate of completion. Well, when I took this class again, I got to interact with other community mentors behind the scenes. Also, got to meet the courses team. I also did the Day of Compassion assignment and that became an addictive and normal practice in my life. Shouldn't we be practicing this every day? We love the feeling that compassion brings to our heart and inspire us to do good things to help others. We do not have to write about everything, still, we can feel the joy of living by helping others, inspired by love and compassion.

Just yesterday, I got to read selected essays written by some of the global learners --who were selected as winners for the 2022 version of the class. Reading those essays was heart warming experience. This inspired me to share my review here, about this class, which is inspiring many to work towards bringing about much-needed social change by applying what we learned in this class about social psychology and how we can understand human psychology and use this to help others.

I will continue to learn and apply many lessons I learned in this class to live a mindful, compassionate, and connected life. I assume, there is something for everyone, and the class experience will certainly lead one to explore the learning further through deliberate practice towards professional and personal development. So, check out and decide for yourself, what you can absorb and carry forward in your life and work!

I had really high expectations for this course, and it certainly lived up to the previous reviews I had heard relating to the material and how relevant it is to daily life. Prof Plous has a very gentle and easy to follow way of explaining concepts, and the recommendation of a textbook makes it easy for students to read up more around the topic. The assignments are EXTREMELY interesting, and possibly the best part of the course. They are also helpful for everyday life, such as the application of social psychology to better CVs and getting feedback from fellow students. Evaluating the projects was also fun and I often did more than required.

The main problem I had with the course is the extremely long-winded nature of some of the lectures, it made me lose some focus and motivation (I was not looking forward to each week as much as I thought I would).

This is the most challenging course I took in 2020 but finally achieved it at the beginning of 2021 with a certificate. With plenty of materials, the course is very close to the Social Psychology course I took 9 years ago on campus in terms of workload.

Even this is the second time for me to learn Social Psychology, I find it much difficult than I thought before. There are many unfamiliar and abstract concepts for me (Unfortunately, I've forgotten most of the concepts in Social Psychology). To make these abstract concepts more friendly to students, the instructor in my previous course tried to teach the course with many stories, experiments and games.

Many conclusions in Social Psychology are counter-intuitive and inspiring but they're only statistically true based on sociological surveys and experiments. It's interesting to learn about them but implementing these conclusions to our real life is still hard. For example, it's hard for us to avoid cognitive bias even we understand it.

Finally, if you are interested in academic research on Social Psychology, the course is worth a try to explore concepts and methods in this area.

I took this course but ended up not doing peer reviewed assignments and not touching reading materials.

I started enjoying it from 2nd week till the 4th week. The first week assignment's answers were discussed in upcoming weeks video material and I was able to see the answer during the video was unique part of this course.

Best part of the course:
- Research findings was explained nicely by the Prof. Plous
- Lots of materials/references to refer.
- Exposure to platforms like "social psychology network"

Sometimes I felt that Prof. is advertising/promoting "social psychology network" (But it is not compulsory to join which is good).

I found peer-reviewed assignments to be difficult to even start with. This might be my personal issue. But I felt, I could have finished assignments if it could have been Multiple Type Questions.

I'm not sure, how much these finding are relevant in practical scenarios but some of the told research findings I found to be shocking.

The field of social psychology is growing rapidly and is having an increasingly important influence on how we think about human behavior. Newspapers, magazines, websites, and other media frequently report the findings of social psychologists, and the results of social psychological research are influencing decisions in a wide variety of areas. Let’s begin with a short history of the field of social psychology and then turn to a review of the basic principles of the science of social psychology.

The History of Social Psychology

The science of social psychology began when scientists first started to systematically and formally measure the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of human beings (Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2011). The earliest social psychology experiments on group behavior were conducted before 1900 (Triplett, 1898), and the first social psychology textbooks were published in 1908 (McDougall, 1908/2003; Ross, 1908/1974). During the 1940s and 1950s, the social psychologists Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger refined the experimental approach to studying behavior, creating social psychology as a rigorous scientific discipline. Lewin is sometimes known as “the father of social psychology” because he initially developed many of the important ideas of the discipline, including a focus on the dynamic interactions among people. In 1954, Festinger edited an influential book called Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences, in which he and other social psychologists stressed the need to measure variables and to use laboratory experiments to systematically test research hypotheses about social behavior. He also noted that it might be necessary in these experiments to deceive the participants about the true nature of the research.