The document provides instructions for an assignment asking students to engage in prosocial behaviors for a day and reflect on the experience. Students are instructed to note their mood at the beginning and end of the day, record meaningful encounters when helping others, and present a PowerPoint summarizing their experience, connecting it to course concepts, and reflecting on insights gained about interactions and behaviors.

1. Assignment Instructions
Week 7 Exercise: Prosocial Behavior
Much of what we tend to focus on when we study social
psychology are topics that often have a negative connotation
such as conformity, prejudice, aggression or obedience. A huge
component of the study of social psychology; however, focuses
on prosocial behavior – behaviors that focus on compassion and
helping others. For this activity, you will focus on this more
uplifting aspect of social psychology. Topics that fall under the
area of prosocial behavior include altruism, helping, bystander
intervention, empathy, and compassion, among others.
For this exercise, pick one day and seek to structure your
thoughts and behaviors entirely around helping others. With
each interaction or action you take, pause to think and ask
yourself “is there a way I might help another here?” Hold a door
for someone, offer your seat, share a smile, give a sincere
compliment, show empathy to another, attempt to be more
patient or understanding, etc. Your efforts should be in social
settings that involve interactions with others (rather than
something such as donating to a charity for instance). The goal
is to be as thoughtfully prosocial in your interactions
throughout the day as possible.
· At the beginning of the day, jot down your general mood,
feelings, attitude, etc.
· Then throughout the day, whenever possible, carry a small
notebook with you or make notes in an app on your phone to jot
down meaningful encounters or experiences as you attempt to
engage in prosocial behaviors.
· At the end of the day, again reflect and take notes on how you
feel, your general mood, feelings and attitudes, etc.
In a 6 slide PowerPoint presentation, not counting title or

2. reference slides:
· Summarize your experience. Describe the prosocial behaviors
you engaged in, others’ reactions to these behaviors, and your
assessment of any changes in mood, attitude, good fortune, or
anything else of note you experienced.
· Review what you have learned about human behavior in social
settings this week in your readings and CogBooks activities.
Connect what you learned or experienced through your day of
conscious, prosocial behavior with the terms, concepts, and
theories from your research. Integrate at least two academic
sources (your assigned readings/resources can comprise one of
these sources), citing any references used in APA format.
· Describe any new insights you gained through this experience
about your interactions with others on a daily basis, including
any behaviors you wish to change or to continue.
· Use the features of PowerPoint to your advantage to
communicate your ideas – include pictures, audio recorded
narration, speaker’s notes, video, links, etc. as appropriate to
enhance your ideas.
· Include an APA formatted title slide and reference slide. APA
components such as an abstract, headings, etc. are not required
since this is a PowerPoint presentation.
Thinking 'Bigger Than Me' in the Liberal Arts
By Steven J. Tepper SEPTEMBER 15, 2014
1 A decade ago, arts leaders faced a crisis in America. National
data indicated significant declines in attendance at venues for
virtually every art form—classical music, dance, theater, opera,
jazz, museums. Bill Ivey, a former chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts, and I offered a counternarrative in
2006: We saw a renaissance in creativity and cultural
engagement, made possible, in part, by new technology. Guitar
sales had tripled in the course of the decade; 25 percent of
college students in one study indicated that they had produced
their own music and posted it online. "Pro-ams" were on the

3. rise—people who were not making money at their art but were
part of robust creative and collaborative communities. More
than 100 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute
suggested the emergence of new forms of online creativity.
2 I now believe the pendulum has swung too far.
3 Much of the cultural activity we celebrated in 2006 could be
categorized as "iCreativity," emphasizing personal expression,
identity, individual customization, convenience, and choice.
Too often that has turned into what I will call "me experiences."
Market researchers call this the era of IWWIWWIWI (I Want
What I Want When I Want It). In both culture and education,
what we need are more "bigger-than-me experiences."
4 Self-confidence is great, but not at the expense of considering
others. A survey of high-school students that has been repeated
for the past 60 years presents a startling picture. In 1950, 12
percent of students agreed with the statement, "I am a very
important person." By 1990 that had risen to 80 percent. Other
scholars have found that student scores on an index of empathy
have been going down over the same period. Moreover, recent
research in cognitive science suggests that media overload
(often implicated in iCreativity) may reduce compassion,
empathy, moral reasoning, and tolerance. For many young
people, if they cannot insert themselves into an experience—
capture it in what some observers call "life-catching"—and
share it online with friends, then it is not worth the effort.
5 "Me experiences" are different from "bigger-than-me
experiences." Me experiences are about voice; they help
students express themselves. The underlying question they
begin with is, "What do I have to say?" BTM experiences are
about insight; they start with, "What don’t I know?" Voice
comes after reflection. Me experiences are about jumping into a
project and making something—an idea, an artifact, a piece of
media. BTM focuses on John Dewey’s notion of "undergoing"—
making something happen in the world, which requires, first, a
shift in our own subjectivity. We must anticipate problems,

4. struggle with ideas, seek some resolution. It’s a process.
6 “Me experiences” aim at maximizing pleasure, rewards, and
positive affect. Getting an A on an exam; getting a dozen
"likes" on a Facebook or Instagram post; being the center of
attention. On the other hand, bigger-than-me experiences pursue
positive relations with others, feeling a sense of purpose,
helping solve a collective problem. They also promote an
attribute central to creativity: imagination. In me experiences,
the ego shapes imagination, providing us with material to
envision who we are and what we might become. BTM
experiences help us develop our empathic imagination—putting
ourselves in another’s shoes, adopting a different perspective,
and trying to identify with a different place, time, or people.
7 Many of us believe deeply in fostering a sense of "bigger than
me" in liberal-arts education. But it is easy to drift away from
that—trying to meet students where they are; encouraging them
to make stuff through new media (often without deep
reflection); giving them choices so that they can find a topic
that fits an existing interest; and filling our classes with "doing"
rather than "undergoing" as we rush from assignment to
assignment and grade to grade.
8 As educators, how do we nurture “bigger-than-me”
experiences in the generation committed to “me”? One way is to
radically change students’ temporal experience. For example,
Jennifer Roberts, an art historian at Harvard
University, required her students to sit in front of a painting for
three hours at the Museum of Fine Arts. At first they resisted
the assignment, but then they discovered so much about the
painting that they never would have experienced in the typical
pace and focus of education.
9 A second strategy is to require students to become immersed
in the perspective and experience of someone very different
from themselves. A good example comes from an assignment in
Ted Solis’s music-as-culture class at Arizona State University’s
School of Music. He requires student teams—from all
performance levels and musical disciplines—to work together to

5. learn the musical technique of another culture. Then the teams
create a new performance in that tradition, using only their
voices and bodies, not their preferred studio instruments.
Learning and performing without notation, and combining
playing and moving, push them beyond their comfort zones.
10 In her book Hiking the Horizontal, the choreographer Liz
Lerman describes creating a similar experience of "free fall"
with students in a history class. She had them retell a sequence
of events—for example, "write a story about what happened in
school last Friday"—in which they came to realize that their
memories were different from everyone else’s in the group.
Students experience the "rug being pulled out from under them"
as each inconsistency reveals a lack of shared understanding
about even the most basic and mundane aspects of life.
11 A third strategy is to invert fundamental roles and social
relationships. Terry McDonnell, a sociologist at the University
of Notre Dame, and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist, teamed
up to challenge notions of privacy and surveillance. Students
from one class were each told to "spy on" a student from
another class (with that student’s permission). Their task was to
collect as much information about the other student as possible,
identify his or her routines, and photograph or record video of
the subject in public. The two classes met at the end of the
semester, with the "spies" presenting fake Facebook pages of
the other students based on all of the information they
collected. McDonnell reports, "The students reflected on how
easy it was to collect this information, the ‘kinds’ of people this
‘representation’ made them out to be, how true or biased the
representation was, feelings of paranoia, and how fragile their
notions of privacy were."
12 Finally, “bigger-than-me experiences” can emerge when an
idea or object or text is introduced or explored in a completely
different context or form. In his famous essay "The Loss of the
Creature," Walker Percy argues that genuine learning happens
when students are spared the distortion of preconceptions,
expert opinion, previous associations, and other people’s

6. expectations. In the classroom, that requires surprising students
by placing something unfamiliar in a familiar context. A
biology student might, one day, find a Shakespeare sonnet on
her dissecting boards; an English-poetry student might find a
dead dogfish on his desk. Both could be asked to poke, read,
explore, and learn about those objects before meaning is filtered
through the educational complex.
13 Katharine Owens, an associate professor of policy and
government at the University of Hartford, gets her students to
cut through existing policy frames by asking them to describe a
public-policy problem through the form of a haiku. The radical
change in format forces them to see the problem in a new way.
By playing with unusual juxtapositions, changing the context of
learning, and adding an element of surprise to the classroom, we
can help students break with routine, get outside of themselves,
and have "bigger-than-me" experiences.
14 It is not a coincidence that many of the above examples of
fostering creativity come from the arts. In spite of the
perception that the arts primarily promote individual expression
and voice, many of the core competencies developed through
arts training create opportunities for "bigger than me"
experiences. In arts classes, students hone their empathic
imagination, routinely shift contexts, ask "what if" questions,
try out multiple perspectives, and, in the words of Lerman,
experience the "free fall" of recognizing that reality is up for
grabs and their assumptions about the world might not be
shared.
15 Our pedagogical challenge in an era of iCreativity lies
somewhere between "me" and "bigger than me" experiences. Or,
as C. Wright Mills said, at the "intersection of biography and
history." We need to inspire students to find their voices and
make learning personal, but we must also help them realize that
authentic growth comes as much from escaping as from
discovering the self.

7. Critical Thinking:
1. Do you think that Tepper is offering mostly constructive
criticism in his essay, or is he more concerned with pointing out
failures or inadequacies of the present generation? Support your
answer by specific references to the text.