Why We Do What We Do: An Introduction to Social Psychology

Have you ever gone along with the group even when you knew they were wrong? Judged someone in a split second and then wondered why? Walked past someone who needed help because nobody else was stopping? Social psychology is the science of exactly these moments. It studies how the people around us, seen and unseen, shape what we think, feel, and do, often without our noticing.

In this class we will run the experiments, not just read about them. We will test whether a room full of people really will conform to an obvious wrong answer, watch how quickly an arbitrary label like eye color can turn classmates into rival groups, and examine why a crowd of bystanders can make everyone less likely to help. We will look closely at prejudice and stereotyping, at what actually draws people to each other, and at what decades of research show about how to reduce hostility between groups!

Grounded in Effective Communication, Social Justice Concepts, and Applied Scientific Reasoning, students will:

1. Analyze classic and modern studies in social psychology, learning to explain not just what researchers found but how they designed their experiments and what those designs can and cannot prove.

2. Connect research to their own lives, using concepts like conformity, the bystander effect, and stereotype threat to make sense of things they have actually experienced.

3. Practice thinking like a scientist about human behavior, questioning claims, weighing evidence, and telling the difference between a strong study and a weak one.

This class is discussion-heavy, hands-on, and rooted in real experiments. It is for anyone who has ever wondered why people, including themselves, behave the way they do around others.

Class Competencies: Advanced Social Science, Social Justice Concepts, Applied Scientific Reasoning