Case Studies in Social Psychology

Dr. Thomas Heinzen, at William Paterson University of New Jersey, is proudest that he has mentored more than 60 student presentations and published research. He has been a keynote speaker at a variety of teaching-related conferences, including NITOP, Rocky Mountain Teaching of Psychology, and the Association for Psychological Science about his book on Clever Hans and facilitated communication. He has been elected as a fellow to the Eastern Psychological Association, to the Association for Psychological Science, and to Division 1 of the American Psychological Association. He has also been an invited speaker at several technology conferences to discuss how to apply principles of game design to social problems such as improving rates of college completion. Students have honored him with a variety of awards that range from being the winning lab in an egg-tossing contest to numerous recognitions from the Psychology Club. Dr. Wind Goodfriend has been named Faculty of the Year three times in her 19 years as a professor at Buena Vista University. This distinction is the result of an all-student vote, and her General Psychology course was chosen as the “Most Recommended” individual class in the entire university by the BVU newspaper. She has also won the Wythe Award, one of the largest collegiate teaching prizes in the nation. She has written over a dozen book chapters about psychology in pop culture, four textbooks for Sage, three Audible audiobooks about psychology, dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, and has published over 30 journal articles featuring her undergraduate students as the first author. She also wrote and “starred” in a docuseries about the psychology of cult manipulation for The Great Courses. Wind won the 2023 Undergraduate Teaching & Mentoring Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Preface: To Students and Their Teachers
Chapter 1 Introduction to Social Psychology
1.1 Does Corruption Corrupt?
1.2 An Error of Intuition: Bloodletting and Purging
1.3 Decision Making: Sex and the Power of the Situation
Chapter 2 Research Methods
2.1 Gang Leader for a Day: There’s More Than One Way to Know
2.2 The Pump Handle Affair: Correlations Can Be Clues
2.3 The Experimental Impulse During the Salem Witch Trials: Why Procedures Matter
Chapter 3 The Social Self
3.1 Who’s Talking Now? Facilitated Communication and the Ouija Board Self
3.2 Personhood Versus Malignant Social Psychology
3.3 Does My Bump Look Big in This? The Pregnant Self
3.4 The Disappearing Self: Phineas Gage’s Horse-Drawn Stagecoach
Chapter 4 Social Cognition
4.1 Intuition in the NICU
4.2 Strange Symptoms and Dual Processing
4.3 Schema Mode Therapy: The Case of Defenseless Jimmy
Chapter 5 Person Perception
5.1 Tell Me the Truth—Am I Too Pretty? Marilyn Monroe and the Halo Effect
5.2 From Street Kid to Magician to Scholar: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Robert Merton
5.3 Pygmalion in the Classroom: The Slow Creation of a Classic Study
5.4 The Rock in the Coffin: Managing Fear of Death
Chapter 6 Attitudes and Persuasion
6.1 When Prophecy Fails: Prelude to the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
6.2 When Prophecy Fails: Alien Apocalypse
6.3 Where Have All the Addicts Gone? Three Predictors Are Better Than One
Chapter 7 Social Influence
7.1 Mods and Rockers: A Moral Panic
7.2 More Than Obedience: Disturbing New Data From the Shock Experiments
7.3 Big Fish Eat Small Fish: Social Coordination in a Violent World
Chapter 8 Group Processes
8.1 More Than a Game: The Prisoner’s Dilemma
8.2 Social Rejection: A Case Study of 13 School Shootings
8.3 On the Shoulders of Giant Women: The First Computer Programmers
Chapter 9 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
9.1 Economic Anxiety and the Forced Deportation of U.S. Citizens
9.2 Institutional Discrimination: The Accidental Conspiracy at Erasmus High
9.3 Footnote 11: After the Doll Studies
Chapter 10 Helping and Prosocial Behavior
10.1 Insects, Vampire Bats, Prairie Dogs, and Fish: Altruism in Animals
10.2 The Bacon Truce: Zig-Zags and the Development of Cooperation
10.3 The Subway Samaritan: The Mathematics of Relative Altruism
Chapter 11 Aggression
11.1 Doloreisa’s Story: Aggression, Prostitution, and Sex Trafficking
11.2 The Great Train Robbery: Violence as Entertainment
11.3 “I Could Just Kill Them!” Fantasies About Murder
11.4 The Cinderella Effect
Chapter 12 Intimate Relationships
12.1 Religion and Marriage Counseling
12.2 Male Victims of Relationship Abuse
12.3 Happily Ever After: Ingredients to a Long, Happy Marriage
References
Index