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into the active mode: “How can I find out what I’d like to know?” Such a change in one’s
thinking about one’s relation to any body of knowledge fires the student’s intellectual curiosity to go
beyond acquiring what is given or required to challenging the given and to seeking the knowledge desired.
If this happens, even “ordinary students” may become scholars and scientists who make extraordinary
contributions to society.
NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS
The two paragraphs above also appear in the student’s Study Guide for Psychology and Life, as does the
highlighted paragraph below. The rest of this introduction and detailed descriptions of each project are
given only in this instructor’s manual. It includes all the material necessary for each project. This saves you
the time, effort, and expense involved in reproducing them. In addition, it allows you to have better control
over how the material will be introduced and developed.
In the lecture that precedes the first demonstration, students should be alerted to the necessity of bringing
their Study Guide to class. Nevertheless, not all students will have purchased the Study Guide by then, so
you may wish to reproduce some of the materials for that demonstration. It will also be important to make
explicit how you will deal with the problem of students who fail to bring the required materials to sections.
NOTE TO STUDENTS
Some introductory psychology courses include a laboratory or discussion section component that
supplements the basic lecture class. We have designed a set of research projects that accompany this edition
of Psychology and Life for use in those courses. If you are in such a course and your teacher plans to use some
or all of our research projects, then you should bring this Study Guide to class meetings. It contains the
materials necessary for carrying out the research projects, such as instructions, stimulus materials, tables
and charts for tabulating your data, and so forth.
Although any of these projects may be worked into an existing course syllabus for a small class, they were
designed to be the core exercises in separate discussion sections led by instructors or teaching assistants.
Each of them has been class-tested and refined over a number of years of use in the Introductory Psychology
discussion sections at Stanford University and in other colleges as well. They have been evaluated as
informative and enjoyable by both teachers and students. We hope you will also find them a valuable
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addition to your course.
If possible, a 90-minute class period should be allotted for each discussion section. In our quarter-long
course, these six sections are supplemented by one period in which the teacher describes his or her current
or recent research interests. In addition, the class chooses the final topic or activity from a set of options
provided by the teacher. The options may be other research projects covering different methodologies, such
as field observations of seating patterns at a campus event, interpersonal distance in public areas,
nonverbal communication, and so on. Alternatively, they may consist of visiting research laboratories in the
department or community. Sometimes the class may go to a movie or play that has a psychological theme
and discuss it afterward. The point is to expose the class to a meaningful psychological activity or exercise
likely to simulate further interest in psychology.
In a semester-length course, the projects here will have to be extended in ways consistent with your course
objectives. That may include either adding other research projects or alternating class sessions between
research demonstrations and discussions or extensions of text and lecture material.
It is advisable that these sections be coordinated with the basic lecture course, yet maintain an identity of
their own. If TAs are conducting the sections, the lecturer should meet with them regularly to plan the
research projects, get feedback on how well they worked, encourage trying out variations on the topics
chosen, and reinforce effective teaching performance. Sitting in on some sections also offers a first-hand look
at how they are functioning.
A good way to get teaching assistants when there is not a sufficient budget for them is to offer a credit
course entitled Practicum in Teaching. Thus, advanced students get credit for learning how to teach, and
they typically learn the course materials more thoroughly than they did as “students.” This experience
makes an excellent addition to their vita. For those who do a good job, the incentive of a letter of
recommendation is often potent. We may offer first-time undergraduate TAs the option of team-teaching two
sections in order to share the anxiety, preparation load, and classroom activities.
Typically, undergraduates at Stanford have taken sections for one credit beyond the units for the lecture
course. When the sections are organized around research projects, the grade is based on general class
performance and attendance, not on any exams. We have found that making sections optional, instead of
required, decreases the number of unmotivated students who register for them.
EXPERIMENTS AND DEMONSTRATIONS
DOMAIN TITLE
Social Perception (First class “icebreaker”) Impression Management and Formation
Sensory Perception Coping with Being Temporarily Blind
Methodology Reaction Times Can Be Revealing
Conditioning Salivating for Pavlov
Memory and Cognition Strategies for Enhancing Memory
Motivation and Assessment Detecting Guilt and Deception
Psychopathology Suicide: Intentions and Acts
Ethics and Research Evaluation and Research Ethics
Psychotherapy Clinical Interventions
Both graduate and undergraduate student TAs report that being able to use this set of materials had many
benefits. Among them they noted: lessening of anxiety at the start of their teaching experience, increased
confidence in presenting a variety of topics and approaches, and saved preparation time. Use of these
materials enabled TAs to perform different functions across a set of activities and generally created a
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positive feeling among their students that something worthwhile was happening in the discussion sections.
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IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT AND FORMATION
OBJECTIVES
1. To acquaint class members with one another and to provide a first-session “icebreaker” to get
students talking.
2. To stimulate discussion about how people form impressions about others and how they manage
the impressions others will form about them.
3. To examine how people’s beliefs influence their social judgments.
4. To demonstrate how interesting questions can be studied experimentally and how subjects’
responses can be quantified and analyzed.
OVERVIEW
In the short time that the class has assembled, it is likely that two processes have been going on: impression
management and impression formation. Impression management is a complex set of verbal and nonverbal
behaviors that a person engages in with the intent to appear in a desired way. Impression formation is the
process of making judgments about the attributes of other people. In this section, we will do the following:
1. Begin by going around the room and having the students introduce themselves by answering the
question, “Who Am I?”