LACC Evaluating Claims in Popular Media Paper

For this assignment, you will find and analyze an example of popular press coverage of psychological research. You will find examples of psychological claims in advertising, magazines, the newspaper, or the Internet.

The popular source you choose has to include a psychological claim, and discuss it in some detail. You’ll have the most fun with a popular source that makes a causal claim, because you can then analyze whether the causal claim is warranted by actual experimental research.

This assignment addresses the most fundamental goal of this class—becoming a better consumer of information. Your assignment is to intelligently critique the claim of the popular press coverage by using a psychology research article. Your overall goal is to use your research methods skills to answer this larger question: Is this popular source’s claim an accurate representation of the original article, or is it misleading to people?

You will need to find an article that mentions an author, institution, journal, etc., so that you can find the original article on which the popular coverage is based.

Your first part of this assignment is to find a popular source AND the psychological article it describes.