This new graduate seminar is a comprehensive overview of the most
active research areas in contemporary mainstream social psychology. It emphasizes ideas and results likely to be
most relevant to our UNM Ph.D. students in the most active lab groups, such as
those in clinical psychology, addictions, cognitive neuroscience, and
evolutionary psychology. It frames
social psychology themes using game theory, evolutionary biology, and cross-cultural
research.
The
course will be intellectually demanding, and will require a substantial amount
of reading, active in-class discussion, and the attentive development of a
serious term paper. The course
readings will require about 3 hours per week outside class – an average of
55 pages per week of serious journal papers and book chapters.
The
game theory content of this course will not require mathematical
sophistication. You will not have to
find Nash equilibria for particular games, or prove theorems. However, you will need to learn a few
technical terms, and do some careful reasoning about the key strategic issues
that arise in each game.
This course’s content is designed to
complement, with minimal overlap, my other 650-level graduate seminars such as
mate choice, human emotions, behavior genetics, and evolutionary
psychopathology. It also has minimal
overlap with my undergraduate courses 231 (human sexuality), 271 (social
psych), and 342 (evolutionary psychology), though it builds upon their content. It is also designed to overlap minimally with
Steve Gangestad’s new evolutionary psychology core graduate course, and with
other anthropology and biology courses in the Human Evolutionary Behavioral
Sciences (HEBS) interdisciplinary program.
If
you have any concerns about your preparedness for this course, please email or
talk with me about what courses you have taken and how well you did.
For graduate students:
This is also probably one of the hardest graduate courses, since most of our
Ph.D. students have only limited background in advanced social psychology, game
theory, or evolutionary theory. It will
require some dedication, some reading time, and some sustained work on the term
paper.
For undergraduates:
This course is open to undergraduates only with my permission, since it is
taken by a lot of advanced Ph.D. students, and is one of the hardest psychology
courses open to undergraduates.
Interested undergraduates should have ideally taken four or more
or the following classes:
If you feel
well-prepared as an undergraduate for this course, please fill out the
‘Application Form” to be distributed in the first class, listing the relevant
courses you have taken, the grades you received, and your reasons for wanting
to take this class. I will let you know
by email within a few days whether you can take the course.
Suggested
background reading
This course assumes a basic knowledge
of social psychology. If you have not
earned a high grade in a comprehensive undergraduate social psych course within
the last few years, I recommend that you read:
Instructors’
contact details:
Dr. Geoffrey Miller,
4th year Assistant Professor
Psychology, Logan
Hall 160
(505) 277-1967
(office/fax)
http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/gmiller.html
Office hours:
Tuesdays, 11 am to noon, Logan Hall 160
The term paper determines 60% of your course grade. You can choose any topic related to the
course content and course readings, as long as I approve it. The final paper should be about 3,000 words,
plus references. I care more about
clarity, insight, research, and the flow of argument than about length per
se.
For graduate students, you would ideally produce a
paper that you could submit to a decent journal as a review or commentary piece
to improve your C.V., and that you would be proud to submit in an application
for a post-doc, tenure-track job, or clinical internship. You’ll get extra credit if you actually
submit the term paper for publication in a reputable journal. Please provide a
copy of your submission cover letter.
To make sure that you are thinking, researching, and writing the paper
on a good schedule throughout the semester, I require the following:
1.
February 21: Provisional abstract, outline, and bibliography due.
You should include a provisional topic statement in
the form of a one-paragraph abstract, a rough one-page outline of the paper,
and provisional bibliography. In the abstract, just let me know what you think
you’ll probably write about. If you change
your mind, no problem, just tell me in an email later. But I want you to have some topic in mind by
this date. Pick a topic that you feel
passionate about – you’ll have to live with it for several months! The bibliography should list about 10 to 20 references
(not all from the syllabus here!) that you have actually read, with
brief notes about their relevance to your paper. This topic statement/outline
will determine 10% of the course grade. Late submissions will be penalized.
After you submit this outline and bibliography, come to our office
hours at least once for my feedback. This is very important; I will
try to make sure your paper looks viable and will try to give you some useful
suggestions and references
2. April 4: Detailed outline and bibliography.
This should
be a much more detailed outline of your term paper, clearly showing the planned
structure of your paper, with a much more complete bibliography. The outline should be several pages long,
and each outline entry should be a clear, detailed, specific statement,
not just a short, vague phrase. For
example, a good outline entry would be “A critical review of 18 recent implicit
association studies shows low reliability and validity for this fashionable new
measure of unconscious prejudices”. A
bad outline entry would be “Review of implicit association research”. Within the outline, refer to you bibliography
entries using standard APA reference format.
After I get
this outline, I will write comments and suggestions on it and return it to you
as soon as I can. This should allow you to submit a really good final draft,
and I hope it will help you improve your writing generally. This outline will determine 20% of the course
grade. Late submissions will be penalized.
3. May 2:
Final draft due.
This should be a highly polished document in correct APA format with no spelling or grammatical errors. It should represent the culmination of three months of research, thinking, and writing about a topic that passionately interests you. This final draft should be computer-printed, double-spaced, single-sided, in 11 point Arial font (preferably), with a proper title page, abstract, references, and page numbering. See the APA Publication Manual (4th Edition) for details. The final draft will determine 30% of your course grade. Late submissions will be penalized. I will try to grade final drafts by the last days of exams.
Structure of the term paper: The
ideal final paper would include the following elements:
Readings for each week will be distributed by the instructor at least a
week ahead of time to each student, either through email (e.g. pdf or Word file)
or xeroxed hard-copy.
All of the
readings were published in the 21st century; most were published
since the last time I taught a course similar to this, in spring 2002. Many are
concise review papers in top-quality journals such as Nature, Science, Psychological
Review, Psychological Bulletin, J. Personality and Social Psychology, and Trends
in Cognitive Sciences. Most weeks
there will be 3 or 4 papers or chapters, ranging from 40 to 80 pages of actual
text to read (not counting references sections), with a mean of 55 pages. This should take about three hours. Some of the readings are harder than others;
some weeks require more reading than other weeks. This reading load is slightly less than in my
other previous graduate seminars, and less than in Jane Ellen Smith’s graduate
psychopathology seminar.
Please do not take this course if you cannot commit an average of three
hours a week to the readings. The major
educational benefits of the course depend on you doing the readings on time;
otherwise, the class discussions will mean very little to you. I expect all of each week’s required
readings to be completed well before class, so you have time to digest them,
think about them, compare and contrast them, and prepare intelligent comments
and questions about them. Last-minute
reading on Sunday night will not result in good comprehension or good in-class
discussion.
Some of the readings are from the following books, which you may want
to buy so you can read ahead:
One week before each reading is due to be discussed, I will ask two student
volunteers to each prepare a one-page set of notes, comments, and questions
concerning that reading. I expect each
student to volunteer for several such reading analyses throughout the semester. The quality of these analyses will form a
substantial portion of your class participation grade, which is 40% of your
final course grade.
When it is your week to present a reading, please bring enough copies
of your one-page analysis to distribute to everyone else in the class. Assume that the other students have read the
paper fairly attentively, and want to know what you think of it. These analyses will serve to initiate class
discussion of that reading.
The one-page analyses should have
your name at the top, the date, and the APA-format reference for each reading
as the header for your comments on that reading. Use numbered lists to identify your specific
notes, comments, and questions under each reading. Please make at least three or four
substantive comments on each reading – not simply summarizing the reading’s
main points, but offering some sort of critical analysis of the reading’s
ideas, or comparison to other readings, etc.
Assume that the other students have read each reading thoroughly and
attentively.
1:
Jan 24 Monday Introduction to
the course
2: Jan 31 Monday Social psychology, human sociality, game theory
(53 pages of reading)
Joachim I. Kreuger & David C. Funder (in
press as target article for Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes,
consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and
cognition. (15 pages) (the additional 30 pages of commentaries and responses
are optional)
***************************************
Robert Cialdini (2001). Chapter 2: Reciprocation. In Influence: Science and practice,
pp. 19-51.
Ernst Fehr & Urs Fischbacher
(2004). Social norms and human
cooperation. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 8(4), 185-190. (5 pages)
Robert Kurzban & Mark R. Leary
(2001). Evolutionary origins of
stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion. Psychological
Bulletin, 127, 187-208. (15 pages)
Lawrence S. Sugiyama, John Tooby, & Leda
Cosmides (2002). Cross-cultural evidence
of cognitive adaptations for social exchange among the Shiwiar of Ecuadorian
Amazona. Proc. National Academy of
Sciences USA, 99, 11537-11542 (5 pages)
Optional (copies available for interested
students):
Colin Camerer (2003). Chapter 8: Signalling and reputation. In Behavioral
game theory, pp. 408-464.
Colin Camerer (2003). Chapter 2: Dictator, Ultimatum, and trust
games. (through section 2.5). In Behavioral game theory, pp.
43-75.
Sarah F. Brosnan & Frans B.
M. de Waal (2003). Monkeys reject unequal pay.
Nature, 425(6955), 297-299. (3 pages)
Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles,
Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, & Robert McElreath (2001). In
search of Homo economicus: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. American
Economic Review, 91(2): 73–78. (5 pages)
Optional (copies distributed)
Alan G. Sanfey, James K. Rilling,
Jessica A. Aronson, Leigh E. Nystrom, & Jonathan D. Cohen (2003). The neural basis of economic decision-making
in the ultimatum game. Science, 300(5626), 1755-1758. (3 pages)
***************************************
Bertram Malle (in press). Attributions as behavior explanations:
Towards a new theory. In D. Chadee
& J. Hunter (Eds.), Current themes
and perspectives in social psychology. (20 pages)
Norenzayan, A., Choi,
Haselton, M. G. & Funder, D. (in press).
The evolution of accuracy and bias in social judgment. In M. Schaller, D. T.
Kenrick, & J. A. Simpson (Eds.), Evolution and Social Psychology.
Optional (copies available for interested
students):
John Sabini, Michael Siepmann, & Julia
Stein (2001). The really fundamental
attribution error in social psychological research. Psychological Inquiry, 12(1), 1-15.
(14 pages)
6: Feb 28 Monday Theory of Mind
(61 pages of reading)
Robin I. M. Dunbar (2003). The social brain: Mind, language, and society
in evolutionary perspective. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 32, 163-181. (16 pages)
Thomas Suddendorf & Andrew Whiten
(2001). Mental evolution and
development: Evidence for secondary representation in children, great apes, and
other animals. Psychological
Bulletin, 127(5), 629-650. (18 pages)
Simon Baron-Cohen (2002). The extreme male brain theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(6),
248-254. (7 pages)
Colin Camerer (2003). Chapter 7: Coordination games (Introduction,
and section 7.1: Matching games). In Behavioral game theory, pp.
336-353.
Optional (copies distributed):
Brian Hare, Michelle Brown,
Cristina Williamson, & Michael Tomasello (2002). The domestication of social cognition in
dogs. Science, 298(5598), 1634-1636. (3 pages)
Robert Cialdini (2001). Chapter 3: Commitment and consistency. In Influence: Science and practice,
pp. 52-97.
Optional (copies distributed):
Robert Kurzban, Kevin McCabe,
Frans B. M. de Waal (2000).
Primates: A natural heritage of conflict resolution. Science, 289(5479), 586-590. (5 pages)
Robert Cialdini (2001). Chapter 5: Liking. In Influence: Science and practice,
pp.143-177.
Lawrence S. Sugiyama & Michelle S.
Sugiyama (2003). Social roles, prestige,
and health risk: Social niche specialization as a risk-buffering strategy. Human Nature 14(2), 165-190. (17
pages)
Optional (copies distributed):
Stephanie L. Brown, Randolph M.
Nesse, Amiram D. Vinokur, & Dylan M. Smith (2003). Providing social support may be more
beneficial than receiving it: Results from a prospective study of
mortality. Psychological Science, 14(4),
320-327. (8 pages)
9: March 28 Monday Social emotions
(42 pages of readings)
Dacher Keltner & C. Anderson
(2000). Saving face for
Jonathan Haidt (2001). The emotional dog and
its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological
Review, 108, 814-834. (17 pages)
Stephanie D. Preston & Frans B. M. de
Waal, F. B. M. (2002). Empathy: Its
ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1-20. (the additional 52 pages of commentaries
and responses are optional). (20 pages)
Optional (copies distributed):
Naomi I. Eisenberger &
Matthew D. Lieberman (2004). Why
rejection hurts: A common neural alarm system for physical and social pain. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 8(7), 294-300. (6 pages)
(57 pages of
reading)
David C. Funder (2004). Chapter 6 “Personality assessment II:
Personality judgment in daily life”, in The personality puzzle (3rd
Ed.), pp. 139-165. NY: W. W.
Norton. (26 pages)
Borkenau, P., Mauer, N., Riemann, R.,
Spinath, F. M., & Angleitner, A. (2004).
Thin slices of behavior as cues of personality and intelligence. J.
Personality and Social Psychology, 86(4), 599-614. (13 pages)
Leslie A. Zebrowitz & Joann Montepare (in
press). The ecological approach to
person perception: Evolutionary roots and contemporary offshoots. In M. Schaller, J. A. Simpson, & D. T.
Kenrick (Eds.), Evolution and Social Psychology.
Optional (copies distributed):
Gosling, S. D.,
Kwan, V. S. Y., & John, O. P. (2003).
Dog’s got personality: A cross-species comparative approach to personality
judgments in dogs and humans. J.
Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1161-1169. (8 pages)
(55 pages of reading)
Robert Cialdini (2001).
Chapter 6: Authority. In Influence:
Science and practice, pp. 178-202.
Eric Alden Smith & Rebecca L. Bliege Bird
(2000). Turtle hunting and tombstone
opening: Public generosity as costly signaling.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 21, 245-261. (14 pages)
Dacher Keltner,
Deborah H. Gruenfeld, & Cameron Anderson (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265-284.
(17 pages)
Optional (copies available for interested students):
Paul H. Rubin (2000). Hierarchy. Human Nature, 11(3), 259-279. (18 pages)
(48 pages of reading)
Miles Hewstone, Mark Rubin, &
Hazel Willis (2002). Intergroup bias. Annual Review of Psychology, 53,
575-604. (20 pages)
Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, &
Robert Kurzban (2003). Perceptions of
race. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(4), 173-179 (6 pages)
C. David Navarrete, Robert
Kurzban, Daniel M. T. Fessler, & Lee A. Kirkpatrick (2004). Anxiety and intergroup bias: Terror
management theory or coalitional psychology?
Group Processes & Intergroup
Relations, 7(4), 370-397. (22 pages)
Optional (copies distributed):
Arthur H. Crisp, Michael G. Gelder, Susannah
Rix, Howard I. Meltzer, & Olwen J. Rowlands (2000). Stigmatisation of people with mental
illnesses. British J. of Psychiatry,
177, 4-7. (4 pages)
Albert Bandura (2000). Exercise of human agency through collective
efficacy. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 9(3), 75-78. (4 pages)
David Sloan Wilson, John J.
Timmel, & Ralph R. Miller (2004).
Cognitive cooperation: When the going gets tough, think as a group. Human
Nature, 15(3), 225-250. (21 pages)
Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis
(2002). Social capital and community
governance. Economic Journal, 112(483),
F419-F436. (15 pages)
Optional (copies available for interested students):
Alvard, M. S., & Nolin, D. A.
(2002). Rousseau’s whale hunt? Coordination among big-game hunters. Current Anthropology, 43(4), 533-559.
14: May 2 Monday Term paper: Final draft due
(51 pages of reading)
Steven Pinker (2002). Chapter 16: “Politics”. In The blank slate: The modern denial of
human nature, pp. 283-305.
John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie
W. Kruglanski, & Frank J. Sulloway (2003).
Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological
Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375. (31 pages)
Optional (copies available
for interested students):
Caprara, G. V., & Zimbardo, P. G.
(2004). Personalizing politics - A
congruency model of political preference.
American Psychologist, 59(7), 581-594. (12 pages)
(Final exams May 9-15: No final exam
in this course)