Essential course information

Welcome to the syllabus website for PSYC3830: Psychology and the Internet. You can use the sidebar to access different syllabus sections, or the arrows on the sides of the page to scroll through the sections in order. Direct links to assignment sheets, rubrics, readings, etc. can all be found within the syllabus, as well as in the site Appendix. At the bottom of this page is a summary of the assignments for the current week.

If you prefer to read the syllabus in a good old-fashioned PDF, you can do so here. (And you can view the old, pre-semester version of the syllabus here).

Instructor Information

Ben Silver

He/him/his

Office hours: Tuesdays 2:30-4:30pm in Sch 318C, or by appointment

Learning Objectives

  1. Students will be able to critique new/innovative psychology research methods and subdisciplines in the context of more traditional methods.
  2. Students will be able to conduct data scraping procedures for real internet data that can help answer psychological research questions.
  3. Students will be able to develop real-world recommendations for internet regulations, internet use, and technology design based on psychological principles.

Course Description

If the purpose of psychology is to understand human behavior, then we need to ensure that the questions we ask and the methods we use accurately reflect the world in which human behavior takes place. Increasingly, human behavior takes place online. In this course, we will approach the intersection of psychology and the internet from two perspectives: the tools we use and the questions we ask. Traditionally, psychology experiments have been carried out in a lab with controlled experiments. But the internet gives us a trove of new tools and datasets to understand psychological processes that have been studied for decades. For example, to study emotions, we can look at personal disclosures on Reddit. To study curiosity, we can look at how people use search engines. In addition, we can also ask new psychological questions that reflect our changing world. How do people present themselves and interact with others online? Why do people share misinformation on social media when they know it’s false? It is important to understand not just how people behave generally, but how they behave online specifically, and how that differs from behavior in offline settings. Each week of the course will focus on a different subset of psychology research about the internet. The first half of the course will focus on new tools to probe classic psychological phenomena, and the second half of the course will focus on new research questions native to online environments.

This is a discussion seminar for advanced undergraduates. Instructional methods include readings, in-person discussions, personal reflections, and two projects. The emphasis will be on psychology literature and psychological principles, but students from related disciplines, including neuroscience, computer science, data science, and information science, among others, are welcome in the course. Prerequisite: At least one previous psychology/cog sci course OR a data science course in any department. This is a 4-credit course.

Role in the Psychology Curriculum

This course is designed to give advanced undergraduate students in the Psychology Department a deeper understanding of the questions asked and the techniques used when studying online behavior. It can fulfill the Seminar requirement or the Special Elective of the Psychology Major and the post-baccalaureate Psychology Certificate; for the Neuroscience & Behavior Major, it can be used to fulfill the P5 Advanced Seminar requirement.

What’s going on this week?

This section will be updated weekly.