“This American Life” Essay

Listen to this immigration-themed episode of the radio program, This American Life:
#621: Fear and Loathing in Homer and Rockville
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(This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page.)
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[Content Note: The second story in this episode is about a conflict over immigration raised after a high school girl reported being raped by two Hispanic classmates living in the U.S. without documentation. Subsequent slurs, threats, foul language, and hatred toward undocumented immigrants and Muslims are reported in the story, including playing voice mail messages. Ann Coulter is interviewed. Details of the rape are not described other than to say the girl reported being forced into the bathroom at the high school. The reasons why the rape charges could not be pursued are reported, including that the girl was “sexting” with the boys and sent them a naked picture of herself. One person in the story uses the term “gang rape.” In the first story, a Muslim man briefly describes being harassed and mistreated by passing motorists.]

For both stories, the journalists do a good job providing a clean narrative that is easy to follow without overlooking the enormous amount of complexity associated with the issues. A big element throughout the stories is the fear that everyone, on all sides, is feeling. The stories are less about what people are thinking, but how and why they are thinking and feeling the way they are. That makes the stories appropriate objects of analysis for social psychology – especially what we’ve learned in this unit about how and why people think the way they do. Your job in this paper is to provide the missing social psychological analysis that can help explain the thoughts and feelings of the people in one of the two stories.

First, listen to simply hear what each story is about and create a “schema” for the story and the style of storytelling. After this first listen, choose which story you will focus on for the paper. (See Content Note above about the second story.)
Second, listen to the story you have chosen for the details: Throughout the story, there are examples of judgments and decisions influenced by the kinds of cognition (including biases and heuristics) you have been learning about in this unit. There are plenty of small examples – a single person’s attitude reflecting a specific heuristic. As you listen, make notes about the concepts from our class discussions and your readings that you hear coming up. I encourage you to pause the recording to take notes about the example and/or simply note the timestamp and the concept, then return to listen later for the details. The examples may be related to things that did happen or were said, or examples may extend to things you think might happen or might be said as a result of the circumstances described.
Third, listen to the story one more time in order to get an idea of how you are going to integrate the concepts you noticed, how you might synthesize all those concepts into a coherent analysis. It is unlikely you will be including every example you identified in #2 in your final paper. (More below.)
Finding the examples of the concepts is challenging and it is the first step you must take before you proceed with the paper. However, the larger challenge for this paper is choosing which examples to highlight and how to synthesize those examples. You need to produce a coherent, overarching analysis. Creating a mere list of examples is not sufficient (and it isn’t an analysis). Instead, aim to provide a coherent paper that talks about “what happened” from the perspective of a social psychologist. The examples you find are evidence for your overall thesis. Your overall thesis should be the most helpful or important way social psychology can explain this story.
Examples of the “bigger picture” kind of perspective your paper should have (feel free to use one):
Analysis of how individual concerns can influence a person’s understanding of larger scale issues Perspectives that emphasize the need to feel right or safe as we engage in social cognition.
Focus on how we make judgments about the credibility of sources when we are invested in an issue
Possible consequences of understanding a person’s situation (e.g., immigration status) as a disposition (e.g., tendency toward crime)