Read Chapter 14 from the course textbook titled, Helping and Prosocial Behavior.
Research, on your own, why people help and don’t help. Research these topics: Altruistic help, Egoistic help, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Negative State Relief Model, Pluralistic ignorance, Diffusion of responsibility, Bystander effect, and Evolutionary theories of prosocial behaviors by reading the e-text and by locating sources on your own.
Identify a real-world situation, event, tragedy, etc. where either an individual or group helped or didn’t help.
After you research these topics, read the chapter and identify a real-world event. Write a 500-750 word editorial expressing your viewpoint about why people help or don’t help and apply the concepts to a real-world event. Use at least one of the concepts from number 2 in your editorial. And remember to discuss a real world situation, event, tragedy, etc. where either an individual or group helped or didn’t help. (See a list of suggested topics to focus on in your editorial)
Consider the following: Who is your audience? Do you want to write an editorial to the public to encourage people to help more? Or do you want to write about the evolutionary perspective to discuss how helping behaviors and the need to maintain cooperative alliances with others has been essential for survival? Or maybe you want to demonstrate to children and teenagers how the bystander effect creates apathy, in order to encourage them to speak up and get help when needed. (See list of suggested topics below)
Please double space your paper, and remember this is a persuasive paper, so you want to convince your reader that your argument is valid. Start your editorial by stating your argument and create an interesting title that lets the audience know the focus of your editorial.
Remember to back up your 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.
Be creative and have fun with this assignment and think about what stance you want to take on helping behaviors and what you want your reader to know about prosocial action or a lack of action. Whatever argument you chose, remember to back up your argument by providing evidence from your sources and use your example from the media. Also, remember to include counter arguments which discuss the opposing side of the argument.
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 might refer to a source in your editorial which is quite common when editors are writing their articles, but you should use your own words and you don’t have to cite within your article. See the general guidelines under the assignment editorial folders.
Upload your completed editorial into the Editorial #3 Assignment folder.