Web site Editor's Note:
Dr. Mindy Erchull, of the University of Mary Washington, has recently surveyed the membership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology so as to ask about the use of video clips in the classroom, with a focus on social psychology. Although this site focuses on personality, many of the responses will be helpful to those who teach personality psychology as well. Her summary of the responses is below, posted with her permission (9/7/06).
Sources of Short Video Clips for Use in Class
By Mindy Erchull
Thanks to everyone who responded with helpful information to my query of a few weeks ago about sources for short video clips for use in class. The following is a summary of the results of my request.
In general:
Textbook publishers were reported to be a great source of these materials as many offer DVDs with short clips of classic studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram’s Shock study, Jane Elliot's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise.
- Jonathan Muller's website was cited as a very useful source for links to online videos and lists of commonly used movies. It is http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow/technology.htm
- He also sends out information about new clips as he finds them in his monthly newsletter about teaching social psychology which you can subscribe to at http://mail.cedarville.edu/mailman/listinfo/socialpsy-teach
- Google video and youtube were frequently cited sources of clips (although you have to do some good keyword searching to find useful material). www.youtube.com and http://video.google.com
- A trick to jump to specific spots in a longer google video selection works as follows. You need to add the number of minutes and seconds into the video to which you want to link, simply by adding #3m20s to jump to 3 minutes, 20 seconds into a video.
- Also, there's add on for firefox called VideoDownloader that lets you save videos from Youtube and Google Video... It saves them as a .flv file, so you either need to download a .flv player (there are some good free ones), or you need to recode them into mpegs or avi's. There are a couple of programs that will do this, but they are a mild pain to work with, and the file quality isn't usually terrific... though often good enough for a class.
- FYI, one person responded that he had found a low quality version of the Stanford prison experiment movie on Google video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= 2683701783583080634&q=stanford+prison+experiment&hl=en).
- Another person indicated that you can find some videos from the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php) for use in class. You can search for videos by keyword, topic, etc., and all are free to download. There may or may not be relevant videos on there, and the overall quality can vary, but it might serve as a useful resource. This site seems to have mainly older films (e.g., clips and educational films from the 50s - 80s), but some of them are good for demonstrating how norms change over time.
- Using clips from mainstream movies was also a common theme. Here are some direction about how to grab some segments for use from a very helpful responder.
- It's a bit of work, but what I do is extract, from movies and other sources, those segments that I want to show my students. As a Mac user, I use an analog-to-digital converter to input stuff from my VCR into iMovie and then select out the segments I want. I then burn a DVD or VCD. I can also "rip" segments from DVD's. For example, I have put together all the multiple personality scenes from Sybil. I have also extracted all the therapy sessions from Ordinary People. I have put together a VCD with a segment from Frontline showing a paranoid schizophrenic (off his meds) followed by a segment from a Charles Mason Parole hearing. It is the only way I can utilize some of the excellent stuff out there without giving up an entire period or even two or three days.
Some specific recommendations:
The Human Zoo series with Zimbardo was recommended (although it is not cheap).
- Another person indicated that he had edited some of the 5-10 minute segments from the Discovering Psychology series (Zimbardo) for use in social classes. Clips include the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Milgram obedience experiments, cognitive dissonance (the Festinger & Carlsmith study), Cialdini on weapons of automatic influence, Rosenthal on self-fulfilling prophecies, and Aronson & Gonzalez on the jigsaw classroom.
- Zimbardo's tapes of segments from the TV show "Candid Camera" were also commonly recommended.
- Daryl Bem did a video called "When Will People Help?" which contains brief recreations of the first two bystander intervention studies (the epileptic seizure and the smoke filled room).
- A PBS Frontline documentary called "Can TV Kill?" (or something like that) was also recommended as it has film clips of some early TV violence studies (Bandura, Berkowitz).
- A 2-part TV documentary, "The Roots of Evil," has some helpful material, particularly a segment on the My Lai massacre with comments by Herb Kelman.
- A 2006 TV show, "The Behavior Experiments" has longer (15-20 minute) segments on the Zimbardo prison experiment, Milgram's obedience studies and the bystander intervention studies, each illustrated by a recent event. (Unfortunately, their contemporary example of obedience is disappointingly trivial according to the person making this suggestion.)
- Another recommendation was for a 20-min video from ABC called "True Colors," in which black and white confederates are sent into the community to show how they are treated differently.
- There is a Frontline episode on PBS entitled "A Class Divided," which describes Jane Elliott's use of the Brown eyes vs. Blue eyes discrimination task in the movie Eye of the Storm. The Frontline episode is a documentary which shows footage from Eye of the Storm, students' reactions 20+ years later, and how Jane Elliott has used this task in adult work groups. You can watch it in segments online at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
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