Topic Paper –

While the topic of your submission is up to you, you are required to make it relevant to a chapter in psychology. Sources of content for your paper include popular press articles (e.g., from the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times, The New Republic etc..), comic strips, short videos from YouTube, and more.

Your topic paper submission should be 400-500 words. Your post should include and will be scored based on the keywords you provide, the information you present about how it is relevant to psychology, your reflection (thoughts) on the author’s argument, and whether or not you include a link and/or screen shot of the article. Each topic submission will be scored on a 30 point scale that considers the:

Keywords and Headings: Provide 3-5 keywords that describe the article (3pts) and use headings (i.e., Keywords, Summary & Relevance, Reflection, & Reference) (2pts)

Summary & Relevance: Summarize the article and describe how it is relevant to the psychological content you’ve selected. You must make an explicit link to content from the chapter (15pts)

Reflection: Give us your reflection on the content of the article and how it relates to psychology (5pts)

Reference: Provide a correct link and/or screenshot of the article (5pts)

Topic Paper Example –

Keywords: Boston Marathon Bombing, immigration, thinking, heuristics, confirmation bias,

Summary & Relevance: I read an article (and watched a short video) about a week after the Boston Marathon bombings, there were politicians interviewed that were using the same event – the bombings – and focusing on different aspects of the same event. One politician used the bombings as evidence that congress needed to discontinue any discussion related to immigration reform because the bombers emigrated to the United States. The other politician was basically saying “Look! This is why we need immigration reform” because we need to know more about the individuals that are already in the United States. Others have said that by barring individuals who are seeking to become United States citizens creates hostility toward our nation. How can proponents of both views look at the same event and gather two completely different conclusions? “The Thinking Mind” chapter in the textbook describes several heuristics (or biases) that we use regularly. A heuristic is a rule-of-thumb form of reasoning that often leads to quick (but sometimes wrong) conclusion. In contrast, an algorithm could be used to arrive at a correct conclusion 100% of the time. I believe that politicians like those interviewed for the article and others are using a bias or heuristic called the confirmation bias. The confirmation bias occurs when people seek out and “absorb” only the information that confirms their view and when people ignore information that disconfirms or challenges their view.

Reflection: Immigration is a very complicated issue, clearly some people are interested in reforming the immigration process. One reform is to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants that are already in the United States and generally relaxing the restrictions for people to enter (and stay) in the U.S. Others are opposed the relaxation of immigration rules and call for a more strict enforcement of the rules in place. The two sides of this argument and the proponents of each will not likely agree on very much if all they are doing is looking for information that confirms their already held view. What would be more helpful to resolve this debate is for each side to allow themselves to be persuaded by seeking out information that challenges their view and even supports the opposing view, thus freeing themselves of the confirmation bias.

Reference: http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/politics/immigration-boston/

Topic Paper Tips –

Notice that in the example above, the content by itself has nothing to do with psychology per se, there weren’t any psychologists interviewed, nor was there any psychology information included in the content. The student had to use his/her knowledge of psychology to analyze the information.

The purpose of the Topic Paper assignment is to FIND psychology in a non-psychology outlet. What you should not be doing is finding the same basic information from the textbook, just found online.

The students that receive the best Topic Paper scores will have found “regular” content and then used what they have learned about psychology to analyze the content.