remember. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 178-183.

colorblind: Differential racial effects of exposure to inadmissible evidence. Personality and Social

Psychology Bulletin, 21, 893-898.

decisions of simulated jurors: A moral dilemma. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 3, 345-353.

Second, imagine you are researcher who has hypothesized that people are more likely to allow inadmissible evidence to affect their decisions when the inadmissible evidence is consistent with other information that they received, and less likely to allow inadmissible evidence to affect their decisions when it is not consistent with other information they have received. Using these three articles, write an introduction for the study in which you will test this hypothesis. Your introduction should introduce your topic, tell why it is important and interesting to study, and summarize relevant previous findings. Note that you do not have to say how you will test your hypothesis, or anything about the methodology to be used in your study. If this were an introduction to a study you were actually doing (and you will write such an introduction later in this course), you would also foreshadow or overview your own study in your introduction, but this time all you have to lead up to is your hypothesis.

Think about your introduction as focusing your reader toward the problem you are studying. First, you use the introduction to bring the reader quickly up to speed--if this were really your area of research, you want to introduce the reader to an area you may have been immersed in for weeks or months (or years!). Give the readers your context, and define any important terms that they will need to understand what you are talking about. (Helpful hint: Remember, each of the 3 articles you are reading has an introduction--you can use them as models.)

In a sense, an introduction is persuasive writing--you must convince readers that they want to continue reading your work by persuading them your problem is important, and that your logic about what you are testing is sound. You don't want to bore readers with a lot of findings that are not directly related to your study, even if you read a lot of articles that are somewhat related or have the same words in their title as the title of your paper. At the same time, you can't skip important steps in how you arrived at your hypothesis. Think about everything that goes in your introduction as being like a step in a path towards your hypothesis. Read what you have written and ask yourself, "Have I wandered off the path? Or have I left big gaps where the reader won't be able to follow the path?" Your goal is the shortest, most direct path to your hypothesis, broken down into simple, easy-to-take steps.

When you come up with a hypothesis, that is your idea (although in this assignment, your hypothesis has been given to you). However, in scientific writing, you must justify why you think your idea is a good one with previous works, rather than simply using compelling rhetoric (although using compelling rhetoric in addition to citing previous works generally doesn't hurt!). Provide a citation for anything that is not your own idea: other people's ideas, other people's research findings, and facts you learned from reading other people's work. It is better to err on the side of over caution than risk a charge of plagiarism.

APA style utilizes parenthetical citations, meaning that you put the last name of the person you are citing and the year of the work in parentheses after the information you are citing:

Chocolate has been linked to both cancer and euphoria (Hershey, 1986).

If there are more than two authors, then you list them all the first time you cite the article:

A state of well-being is induced when chocolate is ingested (Hershey, Nestle, & Mars, 1990).

but shorten the citation to the first author and "et al." plus the date for subsequent citations:

Subjects who ate more than their weight in chocolate got sick (Hershey et al., 1990).

Sometimes, you will have more than one article to back up a fact. List the articles in parentheses in alphabetic order:

Previous studies reveal a high correlation between chocolate consumption and obesity (Godiva, 1993; Hershey, 1986).

Sometimes you will want to phrase your sentence so that the authors of the paper are the agents. Rarely if ever will you use the author's first name when you do this:

Godiva (1983) found that dark chocolate is a more effective aphrodisiac than milk chocolate.

If you cite more than one author this way, don't use the ampersand (save it only for citations where the authors' names are within the parentheses:

The field is indebted to the seminal work of Hershey, Nestle and Mars (1990).

After you've done this once, you use "et al.":

Hershey et al. (1990) received the Nobel Chocolate Prize for these discoveries.

Notice that whenever you use "et al." the "et" (which is Latin for "and") has no period, but the "al." does (it is an abbreviation of the Latin word for "others").

Perhaps you will wish to quote directly what the author says. Do this sparingly, but when you do, you must provide the page number of the quote:

Despite the fact that it has been labeled "the most deadly of our daily pleasures" (Godiva, 1993, p. 167), each American eats on average over 100 kilograms of chocolate a year.

Cadbury and Dilettante (1987) note occasions when people have "gone absolutely ballistic, willing to clobber anyone in their paths" (p. 331) in order to obtain chocolate.