Social Psychology
Fall 2009

 Instructor: Dr. Gabrenya
 Time: 12:30pm - 1:45pm Monday, Wednesday
 Place: Crawford Science Room 404
 Text: Baumeister, Roy & Bushman, Brad (2008). Social psychology and human nature. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.
 Office Hours: Make appointments in main Psychology office. I can be reached very efficiently by e-mail.
 Email: gabrenya@fit.edu Home page: http://my.fit.edu/~gabrenya
 Online mat'l : https://courses.fit.edu/section/default.asp?id=200908-93136-PSY-3441-01

ReadMe

Welcome to Social Psychology, the most important field in Psychology and the second-most important in all of social science!

Social Psychology is the study of the relationship between the individual and society. It has developed for over a century into several forms and approaches in Europe and North America and more recently in South America and Asia. Several of these approaches will be introduced, although most of the material as well as the text will be in the North American Psychological Social Psychology tradition. Due to its central location in Psychology, it has been substantially responsible for the creation of several other applied and theoretical fields, including cross-cultural psychology, forensic psychology, political psychology and environmental psychology.

More than any other field within Psychology, Social Psychology is intrinsically cultural. The cultural basis of Social Psychology and its strong links to cultural and social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology require a cultural and international approach, both of which will be present in this course. The course will be partially "internationalized," meaning it will include an international component in which you will work with students in another country on some projects and assignments.

International Group Project

We will perform a group project in coordination with our partner class at Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan. This project will be performed in groups and will be graded as a group. You can choose your own groups of 3 persons each. We will work with Dr. Chien-Ru Sun (孫蒨如/Sun Qiàn-Rú), a social psychologist. Psychology-Chinese

Small Projects

We will perform a few small projects individually or in groups. See the schedule for more information.

Exams

Combination of essay and objective format, covering text chapters, readings, and lectures. Several quizzes will be given as well as a service.

Writing Project

All upper level courses in the department require a major writing related assignment. We will use the International Group Project for this assignment.

Turn your group project into a full empirical research report in APA style by adding a literature review section based on original literature and adding the other sections of a manuscript. Although the research was performed in a group, the papers must be written completely independently.

The literature review must be based on primary sources and book chapters; you may not use the text or internet sources (with the exception of online peer reviewed journals). At least 10 references are required on which the Introduction is based. The paper will be graded for content and format.

Attendance

Students in the classroom when I call roll will be marked present. If you are late, I will give you partial attendance credit if you remind me after class. (There is a high probability that students who are late will not be marked present at all unless they remind me.)

Academic Dishonesty

Academic dishonesty is the willful misrepresentation of all or any part of another's work as one's own. Copying another's answers or giving or receiving proscribed assistance during classroom or take-home examinations, assignments, papers, research reports, and projects is cheating. Plagiarism in all its forms is cheating; it is the student's responsibility to understand academic expectations for attribution and citation. A student who aids another in cheating shares the guilt of the offense. The College of Psychology and Liberal Arts pursues all cases of academic dishonesty vigorously, according to University guidelines.

Florida Tech has contracted with a private company, TurnItIn.com, to help identify plagiarized papers.  Papers written for this course must be submitted electronically to the TurnItIn.com web site for screening.

Papers that are not submitted to TurnItIn.com will not be graded.

Grading

Exams
55%
   Small Projects
5%
 Midterm 1
15%
 Attendance
5%
 Midterm 2
17%
 Participation
5%
 Final
18%
 Writing Project
15%
Quizzes
5%
 Topical Group Project
15%