Consider a planar region bounded by two curves that are both written as functions of the vertical variable, y. The left and right boundary curves are continuous between y = c and y = d, and these two horizontal lines define the vertical limits of the region. Because the boundaries depend on y rather than x, the area is most appropriately evaluated using horizontal slices.The area is obtained using the Riemann sum method. The region is divided into many thin horizontal strips, each having an...

Consider two continuous functions defined on a closed interval from a to b. The region between these curves is bounded vertically by their graphs and horizontally by the endpoints of the interval. The objective is to measure the area of this region.An initial estimate of the area can be obtained by dividing the interval into a large number of narrow vertical strips of equal width. Each strip is approximated by a rectangle whose height is given by the vertical difference between the two...

People can go to great lengths to protect their self-image and present themselves in ways that they want others to see them. Sociologist Erving Goffman presented the idea that a person is like an actor on a stage. Calling his theory dramaturgy, Goffman believed that we use “impression management” to present ourselves to others as we hope to be perceived. Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present (Goffman, 1959). Think about...

Ideally, the people who observe and record the children’s behavior are unaware of who was assigned to the experimental or control group, in order to control for experimenter bias. Experimenter bias refers to the possibility that a researcher’s expectations might skew the results of the study. Remember, conducting an experiment requires a lot of planning, and the people involved in the research project have a vested interest in supporting their hypotheses. If the observers knew which...

The famous and controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University, demonstrated the power of social roles, social norms, and scripts.

During the 1950s, the landmark Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that when groups must compete with one another, intergroup conflict, hostility, and even violence may result. At the Oklahoman summer camp, two troops of boys—termed the Rattlers and the Eagles—took part in a week-long tournament. During this time, their negativity culminated in derogatory name-calling, fistfights, and even vandalism and destruction of property. However, this work also revealed that such tension...