More favorite Intro jigsaw prompts

Following up on my previous post, I will now share a few more of my favorite jigsaw prompts from my large section of Introduction to Psychology. Feel free to steal, alter, and/or critique these to your satisfaction.

Watch the video called “Why incompetent people think they're amazing - David Dunning” (https://youtu.be/pOLmD_WVY-E) on YouTube (just 5 minutes long). Part of the challenge of being a college student is knowing how to study effectively. What does the Dunning-Kruger effect imply for your perception of your own study skills? What could you do to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect?

ANSWER: Dunning-Kruger means they should not trust their self-perceptions about study skills (or many things). To fix, search out feedback, and keep learning!

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Much of psychological science attempts to answer what, when, and how questions, like: What is the brain made of? When do people develop empathy? and How can we treat depression? Evolutionary psychology seeks to answer one why question: Why does the brain work this way? The good thing is that the answer is almost always the same, no matter what aspect of brain function we’re talking about: because it is adaptive to work this way. First, what is meant by adaptive?

Second, try to answer the following questions from an evolutionary psychology perspective:

1.    Why does the brain store information (memory)?

2.    Why do we experience emotions?

I’ve already told you the answer to both questions (because it’s adaptive), the trick is to explain how these things are adaptive. Give it a try.

ANSWER: adaptive means it helps survival and/or reproduction. Memory helps us remember useful things like where to get food or avoid predators. Emotions are helpful because they alert us to important things in our environment. Also helpful for communication.

BTW: I (we) use Gazzaniga's Psychological Science (6th edition). Nice text, and I really like Norton's InQuizitive system, which I assign and rely on to deliver the content in the course so I can do the jigsaws in class. Maybe in a later post I'll talk about my views on lecture in this class. They have evolved.