Psychology
On July 7th, 2021, Neeraja Poonjolai and Nada Saraswathi-Mohan started a psychology summer class for Purpose Academy students. In this class, students will have the opportunity to learn more about themselves and the myriad of factors that influence human behavior in general. Students will be learning about how social situations affect behavior, how people sense and perceive the world, how personality is measured, and more through fun and interactive activities.
In the first class, students were introduced to social psychology, which deals with interpersonal interactions and influences. They learned about major experiments in the field, specifically the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment, and Asch Experiment to understand how social influences can cause people to behave in surprising ways. Students also filled out an ethics questionnaire to better understand how people’s own assessment of their moral compass may not always translate to group situations.
In the second class, students learned about how the processes of sensation and perception couple to allow us to interpret and observe the world around us. They learned about key terms, such as selective attention, and about the processes by which humans receive sensory information by viewing diagrams of the eye and ear. Additionally, students were given real life examples of sensation and perception at work by viewing a video demonstrating inattentional blindness, learning about the Visual Cliff Experiment to understand depth perception, and by viewing a video demonstrating stroboscopic motion. At the end of the lesson, they completed a challenging word search using vocabulary from the lesson.
