Overview
Paper assignment: Applying Psychological Science Paper
This document pertains to our first paper assignment, the Applying Psychological
Science Paper (APSP). As a reminder from the syllabus, APSP #1 is due on Monday,
October 6th, end of the day (11:59 pm).
The paper assignment has two major parts:
(a) to address an applied challenge, that is, some challenge faced in the “real world,”
outside of university departments of psychology, by
(b) making use of information in a scientific paper that presents some scientific evidence
that can be used to address the challenge.
In this document is a list of applied challenges and associated scientific papers
from which to choose. You should choose one of these as the topic for your paper. If you
choose a topic that is NOT on this list you will not earn credit for this assignment.
Once you choose a topic, your assignment is:
(1) to describe the theory and research presented in the scientific paper that is
listed for your topic
(2) to explain how that theory and research addresses the applied challenge,
in other words, to explain how the psychological science (the theory and research
in the paper) might help to solve the problem faced by the person with the applied
challenge.
The paper you write should be 3.5 - 4 pages in length, double-spaced. That would
be the length in font size 12, 1-inch-margins; this would equate to about 1100 words of
writing. In these 3.5-4 pages, you should be accomplishing the two asks above: (1)
describe the theory and research presented in the scientific paper you read (answer
questions such as: what is the main idea of the paper? What are the main research
findings supporting this idea? What methods did the researcher use to support their
findings?), and (2) explain how that theory and research can be applied to the applied
problem (explain what the person facing the applied challenge might do differently if
they knew about the theory and research in the paper). You should spend about an equal
amount of space on each of the two tasks; your paper should have about 2 pages
describing the theory and research that is presented in the relevant scientific paper, and
about 2 pages explaining how the scientific information might be used to solve the
applied problem.
Notes on the Readings: You do not have to do any additional outside reading.
Source : Suppose you are a lawyer. You are working for a client who has been charged with a
crime. Making matters worse, your client has confessed to the crime. But now says he is
innocent. Making matters even worse, he was videotaped while confessing. Yet he now
insists he is innocent, and explains to you that his confession was not a real confession.
The police forced him to confess. His confession was coerced. Your job is to go to court
and explain that the videotape of the confession is not iron-clad proof that your client is
guilty. He still might be innocent. You also want to argue that the videotape of his
confession should not be shown in court because showing it would be unfair to him.
These are the arguments you have to make. How are you going to make them? Is there
any help from psychological science?
Relevant scientific paper:
Lassiter, G. D. (2002). Illusory causation in the courtroom. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 11, 204-208.