What should be in the paper:

300-word application paper. Your paper should include a real-world example (this example can come from current events, a book you read, something you learned from a different class, a behavior you observed on TV or in real life, a historical event – literally anywhere) and should clearly exemplify the lesson from the module (Human Behavior is Goal Oriented)

Your paper can be a little over 300 words without penalty

You do not need to read additional resources for this assignment

You do need a reference page

You do not need to write the paper in APA or MLA format

If you do decide to reference an outside source, you must cite it to avoid plagiarism. I do not have a preference for how you cite this work, but I do care that you credit others for their ideas and not take credit for other people’s work

What the paper is about:

The course is Social Psychology, and the professor shared multiple slides, each talking about some (in my opinion unrelated) factor which explains the topic of the assignment “Human Behavior is Goal Oriented”, and the reasons why humans do what they do.

OPTION A) One of the slides talked about something called Cognitive dissonance describes aversive arousal experienced when you have two discrepant cognitions or when your behavior does not align with your beliefs. As a classic example, most smokers know that smoking is bad for them, but they smoke because they are addicted. The knowledge that their behavior and cognitions are inconsistent causes dissonance. In order to resolve this, the smoker might choose to a) change the behavior (i.e., quit smoking), b) downplay the importance of the cognition (e.g., it’s more important to enjoy your life than think about what’s going to kill me), or c) change the cognition in some way (e.g., well, the research on the bad effects of smoking are not definitive or somehow do not apply to me). Returning to our big decision example, the reason why you might look back on your unchosen option so unfavorably is because you have resolved the cognitive dissonance brought about from not selecting that (at the time) good option. This particular brand of cognitive dissonance is referred to as the spreading of alternatives.

OR … OPTION B) Another slide talked about such things as initial attraction and mate selection. which includes topics and reasons for mate selection through parental investment in mating. The idea behind parental investment is that animals (including humans) differentially contribute to raising offspring. For humans, women generally contribute more time to raising offspring – they have the burden of carrying babies, nursing, and raising children. Women are limited to having one child at a time (more or less) and it takes a lot of resources to do so, whereas men can have theoretically limitless offspring and can contribute minimally to child rearing. This makes females the limiting sex in humans. As such, heterosexual females try to find partners that have resources, whereas males focus on features that signal fertility, such as youth and health.

RECAP: 300-word application paper. Your paper should include a real-world example (this example can come from current events, a book you read, something you learned from a different class, a behavior you observed on TV or in real life, a historical event – literally anywhere) and should clearly exemplify the lesson from the module (Human Behavior is Goal Oriented)

This is a 300-word application paper. You can choose what real-world example you want (this example can come from current events, a book you read, something you learned from a different class, a behavior you observed on TV or in real life, a historical event – literally anywhere) and should clearly exemplify the lesson from the module (Human Behavior is Goal Oriented). The material was on the original injury, what information might be useful, so please reread that carefully, and theres also a video which can help. The main thing is to write something original.

Answer preview

The active psychological process of decision making can cause a state of cognitive dissonance whereby the choice may conflict with an individual’s set of beliefs and values. According to Dr. Philip Zimbardo, people reach a point in which they convince themselves that they must love what they suffer (Jones, 2010)…

 

(300 words)