At the University of Virginia I have taught (or hope to teach) the following
courses:
Undergraduate:
USEM -- The
Psychology of Information and Persuasion
Psychology 305
-- Statistics and Research Methods
Psychology 468
-- Psychology and Law: Cognitive and Social Issues
I used to teach
Psych 215: Cognition and may do it again sometime.
Graduate:
Thinking and
Reasoning
Cognitive and
Social Psychological Issues in the Law
Graduate Course
Every Other Year or Every Third Year
Students: I'm interested in getting students from various areas of psychology
and some other departments (e.g., philosophy, education) to take this course.
The exact content of the class will depend on who is in it.
The idea is for us to read classic and contemporary research in cognitive
psychology on topics like: similarity, categorization, hypothesis testing,
induction, analogy, heuristics & biases, rationality, causal and
counterfactual reasoning, explanatory coherence. For each topic, we spend a day
or two on the cognitive psychology, then we spend a day or two on how that
topic is useful for, or has been extended to, or is applied in other areas of
study.
For example, relevant social psychology issues would include: reasoning
about self vs others; outgroup homogeneity effects; motivated reasoning;
stereotyping; confirmation bias; illusory correlations, group reasoning. In
clinical psychology, there are issues involving causal attribution and/or
counterfactual reasoning and depression; DSM and categorization. There are
plenty of developmental and aging issues in this research; also individual
difference issues; also teaching/training/educational issues. Of course, I'm
always happy to think about how this stuff relates to legal reasoning. And most
of this research stems from questions initially asked by philosophers.
Most Spring Semesters
It is the job of an educated person to think critically about information – how it was obtained, used (or misused), analyzed, and reported. In this course we do that within the domain of psychology. You will learn various techniques for conceptualizing, conducting, analyzing, and reporting psychological research. Topics covered will include: Formulating interesting and ethical research questions; developing research ideas into research studies; organizing and analyzing data from research (both by hand and by computer); reporting psychological research in a professional format; and learning to be a critical consumer of psychological research literature. But make no mistake about it – although the domain here is psychology, what you learn will be relevant to the kinds of information you are exposed to constantly in your daily life. Therefore, another objective of the course is to show how what you have learned here applies to the world outside.
Every Other Year (or so)
Examines issues for which cognitive and social psychology may be able to
inform the legal system. Topics include: eyewitness testimony, recovered
memories, line-ups, expert testimony, jury selection, jury decision making,
jury instructions, and the use of statistics in the courtroom. If your interest
is in children, families, and the law, please take Psyc 346 with Professor
Reppucci -- do not take this course.
Some Fall Semesters
Wherever you look, people are trying to persuade you of… things… what do buy, whom to believe. How can we evaluate the information and debunk the bad claims? In this course we will read from books like “How to Lie With Statistics” and “How We Know What Isn’t So” to figure out how to separate bad arguments from good reasoning. We look at these issues in all contexts: science, advertising, politics, and everyday life.
An introduction to (a) methods for studying the human mind and (b) the topic
areas in Cognitive Psychology. Contemporary cognitive psychologists learn about
the human mind not only from psychology experiments, but also through
neuroimaging, computer simulations, theories of cognitive evolution, cross
cultural analyses, philosophical debates, and individuals with various
cognitive deficiencies. We will integrate findings from these different methods
as we study, among other things: attention, mental imagery, memory, the
acquisition of expertise, reasoning and problem solving, and language.
Last modified: December 5, 2006