PSYC1001 Fundamentals of Psychology

Task:

Aiims

The aim of this assignment is to develop skills in creating the introductory section of a formal scientific report. Firstly, you will perform a search to find literature related to the topic in question and review this literature. Additionally, you will think creatively and logically in order to develop a novel idea for an experiment, which extends the research literature in your review.

You should start with a general introduction to the phenomenon of group pressure/conformity,and to the Asch experiments. You may want to draw the reader into this body of work by placing it in the context of a real-world example. Why is this research important in general to psychologists, and to the layperson?

You should then describe the work presented in the literature you have read, discussing the key theoretical ideas behind conformity and group pressure, and critically analysing the research you have found. You should not simply copy text from these articles: this is plagiarism. It is your job to simplify the concepts and present them as a coherent introduction. You need to be careful to present a suitable level of detail: enough such that a reader who is unfamiliar with the work can follow what you are saying, whilst minimising irrelevant information and keeping within the word limit. Aim to write concisely and efficiently to express the points you wish to communicate. See more details about how to write an introduction below. 

Some potential strategies for choosing a research question, designing your research, and rationalising it:

You may have identified a problem with the original studies. Propose a new experiment that fixes this problem, and describe in general terms how your experiment would be conducted.

The experiment you design may follow-up the research findings reported by Mori & Arai (2010) and explore issues the authors raise in their study. How can you test the ideas they present in their discussion section?

The authors also suggest that the MORI technique can potentially be used to help understand the reasons for people’s conformity, so you might also think of research questions relating to conformity that can benefit from the use of this technique, and design a study to address them.

Mori & Arai (2010) propose that their MORI technique is useful to replicate the Asch studies without the use of confederates. Can you think of any other ways to conduct these studies that overcome some limitations with the MORI technique?