Teaching Materials

[Update September 2009: There are great "GPM" materials available here.]

The MPG Illusion can be a useful topic to discuss in a range of high school and college classes. It may be useful for:

• Showing the link between psychology and climate change in an intro psych class
• Showing framing effects (and debiasing) in a judgment and decision making class
• Discussing consumer decision making in a marketing or environmental economics class
• Illustrating a basic math concept (inverse relationships) with a consequential consumer decision.

Start by looking at the MPG Illusion teaching materials gathered at the terrific Social Psychology Network site. (These materials received an honorable mention for Action Teaching.) The SPN site is full of teaching resources, articles, and links related to social psychology and psychology in general.

Here are a few additional materials that overlap in part with the materials gathered at SPN:

Teaching notes - These notes focus on how to use quizzes and other materials to teach about the MPG Illusion in psychology classes. The MPG Illusion may also be of interest in economics and math classes.

Slides - These powerpoint slides contain quizzes, graphs and tables, results from the Science studies, and slides that connect the MPG Illusion to other topics.

Additional topics - These notes describe ways to use the MPG Illusion to lead into more general questions about greenhouse gas (GHG) decisions and about "nudges."

The following links are shorter, more memorable urls for the quiz, video, and calculator:
www.mpgquiz.com
www.mpgillusionvideo.com
www.gpmcalculator.com

Math teachers: The NSF has a special report on math education that includes the MPG Illusion.