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Unit 5 Seminar – Controversies in
Psychology
Thursday, 9:00pm
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Factors affecting IQ scores
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Environmental factors
Education level
SES status
Individual factors – motivation, mood, stress level
Culture Bias
Language
 Definitions
 Attitudes, motivation, values
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Culture – Fair Testing
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Advantages/Disadvantages
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Present in almost every psychological topic
Social vs Genetic influences
Some common areas of debate
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Intelligence
 High genetic prevalence
 Also dependent on social factors such as education and
income level
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Personality
Addiction
 Children of alcoholics/drug addicts are more likely to abuse
alcohol later in life
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Psychological disorders
 Depression, OCD, Schizophrenia – all shown to have genetic
tendencies
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Present in legal terms since 13th century
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A defense asserted by an accused in a criminal prosecution to
avoid liability for the commission of a crime because, at the
time of the crime, the person did not appreciate the nature or
quality or wrongfulness of the acts.
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Only 1% of defendants use the insanity defense – only 20% of
those cases are acquitted
A mental institution is the option besides prison
Attempted Reagan assassination
Issues of controversy
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Legal vs medical
Limits those who cannot afford good legal services
Free will cannot be explored in medical terms
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Topics such as life after death, esp,
reincarnation, ghosts and spirits, astrology, out
of body experiences explored
Popularity and respectability of the field
continues to decline
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Lack of funding for research
Lack of solid research with controlled variables
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Subliminal messaging
 seek to attack our subconscious – in other words, we are
processing the information but not in a way that we are aware
of- we are processing them in our subconscious- because we are
not attending to them
Heuristic persuasion
 appeals to habits and emotions – people use heuristics or rules
of thumb when determining what to believe
Informational Influences
 occurs when a person’s behavior is influenced by another’s
behavior because the latter provides information about what is
good or true.
 Buzz words
Product placement
 when companies pay to have their product placed in the media
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Social psychology Research
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methodological technique whereby a participant is
not made fully aware of the specific purposes of the
study or is misinformed as part of the study
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Milgram’s obedience study
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Deception in reality tv?
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Debriefing to address ethical concerns