1. Pat and Kim care passionately about the environment. Yet they drive their cars to work (rather than take public transport), and prefer to read hard copy rather than off the screen. They believe they should get solar heating for their house, but somehow haven't got around to it. When they can afford it, they fly overseas for their holidays and then decline to pay the optional 'carbon offset'. 

Draw upon the social psychological literature into attitude-behaviour relationships, and other relevant topics, to discuss: Why don't people (like Pat and Kim) act on their environmental concerns?

OR

2. Organisation XYZ has made a succession of poor hiring decisions. Many people apply for its jobs, but, after all applicants have been interviewed, the person appointed too often proves to be a disaster! The Big Boss of XYZ recognises that much of the problem lies in XYZ's interviewers' use of faulty processes of person perception and impression formation.  Draw on relevant social psychological literature to critically review ways in which the interviewers' perceptions and inferences may be flawed. Propose and defend some strategies for reducing person perception /impression formation biases and thereby improving the quality of XYZ's appointment decisions.

OR

3. Customers are often dissatisfied with the service they receive in restaurants, shops, banks, etc. Often they do not voice their dissatisfaction directly to the person who provided the service, but when they do, how should service providers respond?  Should they acknowledge their errors, apologise, justify their actions, make excuses, promise to do better next time, and/or ....? What non-verbal behaviours should they display? Review relevant social psychological evidence, and critically discuss the communication skills and strategies that should (and should not) be employed in these service failure situations to help return disgruntled customers to a more satisfied state.

Researching your assignment

Note that you will need to carry out independent library research in order to develop your response to your selected research question. Since each question relates to a topic that will be treated in the 2008PSY course, a good starting place for your research will be your textbook (Vaughan & Hogg). Your reading here will provide you with some general background relevant to your chosen research question. In addition, it will provide you with some starting references that you will be able to follow up in your literature search.

However, there are a number of important points to recognise in carrying out this assignment.

1. You will not be able to answer your chosen question by simply drawing upon your life experiences, and/or upon the relevant chapter from Vaughan & Hogg. This is an assignment that requires a review of the literature; hence the expectation is that you will need to do some library research in order to develop your response. One implication of this is that you will need to start your assignment soon in order to have sufficient time to carry out the library research.  This is not an assignment that you will be able to start and complete on the night before the submission date.

2. You will not be able to find an answer to your chosen question in one textbook or research article. Rather, you will have to research the topic and build an answer based upon your reading. Further, since most textbooks will provide a similar level of general description relating to your topic, your response will naturally draw more upon papers and articles in research journals, rather than texts. Psychinfo is a good data base to commence your search.

3. Your response will draw upon both the relevant theory and research relating to your selected topic.

4. It is simply not possible to specify the (minimum) number of readings that will provide you with an adequate answer to your selected topic. Whereas the correct answer to this question is, "as many as it takes", you can anticipate that it will be at least in the 8-15 range.

5. When making notes from texts and research journals, be very careful to keep the full reference of the texts/journal articles. In addition, if you record particular sentences and paragraphs, rather than paraphrasing them, be sure to put them in quotation marks. This will help you avoid any problems with plagiarism (see below).