Developmental Psychology: a Media Misrepresentation

Abstract

43 Participants of from a psychology undergraduates undertook a self-reported questionnaire after they were tasked to read a friction us news article regarding an aid appeal for Haitian earthquake victims. The present study examined if a strong social consensus triggered by perceived collective action would indeed change the level of support for humanitarian. Results from the studies were mixed. Unexpectedly, our hypothesis did not get supportive evidence that social consensus information have an influence towards helping behaviors. However results shows there were some associations between some of the measured variables. Further research is needed to clarify with role of group membership and its reference source. Other confounding factors that’s could have affected results like gender, age, salience, threat, timing and resources could have also have contributed to the test results but were not considered in this study.

Science journalism in the mainstream media is becoming an ever more increasingly important role as an information dispensary to the general public, as such this vital function as a news ‘gatekeeper’ plays an influential and critical role in the world of mass media that covers popular science. Due to the widespread coverage of the Internet and increasing demands of a fast-paced and better educated audience, science reporting has a more popular and available information tool than ever before. The essay objectives were to look how development research articles are reported by mainstream journalists through common mass media. We set to achieve that objective by that by critically and meticulously analyzing a media report and its relevant research article. The science article that was selected is a literature review for research on intuitive physics in developing infants (Hespos & vanMarle, 2012) and the article was reported by Nina Mandell of New York Daily News on Jan 26th 2012 (Mandell, 2012) . Any professional and proper...