09 Jul Editorial Assignment

1. Read chapter 10, Conformity and Obedience, from our course e-book. Watch also the required video, Psychology of Evil at 
• If for some reason the link above doesnt work, please go to  and type in the search bar: Philip Zimbardo: The Psychology of Evil, and you will see the video.

• There is also a transcript you can download and read for the video.  When you go to the link above, click on the transcript link and you can read over the transcript.

2. Research the topics: Social influence, conformity, compliance, and obedience by locating sources on your own. Also, please research three well known social psychology experiments: the Asch experiment, the Milgram experiment, and the Stanford prison experiment.  

3. After you research these topics, read the chapter, and watch the video for this editorial, write a 500-750 word editorial expressing your viewpoint of Social Influence and the benefits and consequences of complying, conforming and obeying. What does the video indicate are the effects of social influence? Please make sure you discuss the video in your editorial no matter what argument you use in your editorial! (see below for a list of suggested topics). Please discuss at least one experiment also.

4. Please double space your paper, and remember this is a persuasive paper, so you want to convince your reader that your argument is valid. Begin your editorial by stating your argument and create a fun title that lets the audience know what the focus of your editorial is.

5. Remember to back up your own arguments by providing evidence from your sources. Discuss specific experts in the field, and what their views are, discuss statistics, and specific authors and facts from the research you located.

6. Be sure to include counterarguments to present opposing views about social influence.

7. Editorials need to be written in your own words so make sure you are not copying ANY information from sources. You will not need to provide in-text citations, but you will need to add your sources in APA style at the bottom of your editorial in a reference list. You want to refer to your sources in your editorial, and add in specific facts, and specific studies, and specific experts in the field. This is quite common when editorial staff are writing their articles, but you should use your own words and you dont have to cite within your article. However, if you do add in a quote from a source, then you will want to properly cite the quote by putting it in quotation marks, and adding an in-text citation.