Welcome to Social Psychology. I am so glad you're taking this course.

I'm Scott Plous, Executive Director of Social Psychology Network, which I'll talk about in a later video, and professor of psychology at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut, almost exactly between New York and Boston, about two hours from each city. Here's our corner of the world. Wesleyan is a private university, non-religious, fairly selective, and expensive, but thanks to the magic of Coursera and a decision by the Wesleyan administration, this short course is being offered free of charge to anyone who is interested. So let's hear it for Coursera and Wesleyan. Seriously, Wesleyan has contributed funds for the hardware and software needed to create this course as a sort of experiment in higher education, and of course, as a public service. And I should probably mention up front that I, myself am not making a penny from the course. I'm joining this effort because I genuinely find the idea of free education incredibly exciting. So I'm honored to be your instructor, happy to do it. And to help administer the course, we have some wonderful teaching assistants. Ema Tanovic is a student intern with Social Psychology Network and has already served as a social psychology TA at Wesleyan. Ema is originally from Bosnia and, as you might guess from her photo, is one of the world's greatest cat lovers. I've asked Ema to say a quick hello to you. >> Hi everyone. This is Ema. Welcome to Social Psychology. I'm really looking forward to working with you. >> Tawni Stoop, who seems to be mixing some baking ingredients in a strange location, whoop, there you go, is also a

Social Psychology Network intern who's now loaning her psychology expertise to this course. Here's Tawni. >> Hi everyone, it's Tawni. I'm so glad that you're taking the course. Hopefully I'll see you around in the discussion forums. I think we're going to have a lot of fun. And last but not least, Donovan Suh is also a Social Psychology Network intern, when he's not playing tennis. Over to you, Donovan. [SOUND] >> Hey, everybody. It's Donovan Suh from Los Angeles, California. My two favorite things in life, tennis and social psychology. Hope you have a blast. As for my own background, the Coursera website already has an overview in links, so I'll be brief. My undergraduate psychology degree came from the University of Minnesota, where I spent many happy hours in dear old Elliot Hall, and my doctoral and post-doctoral work was done at Stanford University with Phil Zimbardo as my graduate advisor. As you can see from this photo, Professor Zimbardo has become something of a superhero in the field, and he's done this course a good deed by generously granting anyone who takes this course free access to his documentary on the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. You'll also have free access to several other online videos. A great video entitled The Abilene Paradox. In a later lecture, I'll talk about what the paradox is, it's really, really fascinating. Stanley Milgram?s classic film Obedience and an ABC News Primetime follow-up. A PBS documentary with surprising research on what makes us happy and, just as important, what doesn't. Two animated guest lectures, the first, called Secrets from the Science of Persuasion, is a joint lecture by two world class experts on the topic, and the second is on empathy and The Power of Outrospection, of getting to know yourself, not just through introspection, but through the lives of other people. And of course much, much more. One unique aspect of the course is the large number of individuals and

organizations contributing free materials, beginning with David Myers of Hope College and Mike Sugarman of McGraw Hill, who are allowing us to use two outstanding textbooks authored by Professor Myers. Here are just some of the contributors. Please see our course sign-up page for a more complete list and I'll acknowledge others as the course unfolds. These groups have been just incredibly generous. Another unique aspect of the course is that we'll be using resources from Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. In a later video, I'll give you a tour of the network, which I founded in 1996, long time ago now, and which has had over a quarter billion page views since then. In that video, I'll describe some features that I think would be of special interest to members of the class, and I'll invite you to join the network. Coursera and Social Psychology Network have teamed up to create some wonderful new resources that I think that you'll like. You can see that the network is very excited to meet you. One other aspect of the course that makes it a bit unique is that we'll begin with a snapshot quiz to take a picture of your thinking before being exposed to the lectures and assigned readings. That way, you'll be able to compare your answers with the results of research that we discuss later. In other words, you'll be able to privately view your own quiz answers right in the lecture videos, a new feature that Coursera created just for our class, and as far as I know, something that's never been done before in an online course. And when the course ends, the snapshot quiz will also help you see how much your psychology expertise has changed. You know, it's easy to say that psychology is just common sense, but when you dig deeper, there are all sorts of questions in which you can think of good reasons why the answer might be yes, and equally good reasons why it might be no.

In dating and marriage, do opposites attract? Does punching a pillow reduce aggression? Do women fall in love faster than men? Is it true that money can't buy happiness? That's where social psychology comes in. It's the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. It uses many of the same experimental methods found in other branches of science. It uses many of the same techniques for data analysis, and the results of these investigations are typically published in peer-reviewed research journals. And as long as we're talking about research, I should also mention that from time to time in these videotaped lectures, I'm going to pause the action to ask you a question. It might be to predict research findings before I share them with you, just to take a guess, or it might be to ask you about something covered in the lecture just to make sure you're following the material. It might even be to ask you a question that doesn't have a right or wrong answer just to stimulate your thinking, help you think about a topic actively rather than passively watching the videos. Let me just turn out the lights for a moment, and give you an example. [NOISE] If you're like most people, you answered yes to this question. Not everyone does, but most people do. What's interesting is that if you give a different set of people the opposite research finding, that is, that attractive people are seen as more intelligent, a majority will still say that that's what they would have predicted. Why? What's going on? Well, it's something known as hindsight bias or the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect and it's covered in this week's assigned reading. It's the tendency for people to see things as more obvious in hindsight after they have already learned about an outcome. The moral of the story, with respect to social psychology findings, whether they're about physical attractiveness or anything else, is that they're a lot harder to predict when you don't already know the outcome, and that's what makes it interesting,

that's what makes it worth studying. So, if you want to know whether attractiveness is positively related to whether people will see you as intelligent, or you want to know whether opposites attract, stick around, and you'll learn about that and many other research findings before this course is over. That's the deal. That's the deal. If you commit yourself to a few hours each week for the duration of the course, instead of picking and choosing I like this topic or that lecture or I'm not so nuts about this reading, but you take it as a package and commit yourself, few hours each week for six weeks, I promise that I will do everything possible to make this course worth your valuable time. How will it work? That's the subject of our next video. I'll see you there.