We often aren’t aware of how much influence attitudes and norms of our social environments have on our views, preferences, and decisions until we take a closer look. Studying social psychology aims to better understand the interchange between our social environment and our personal development. This assessment invites you to conduct a simple observational study to examine your environment for influence factors.

Imagine you’ve been asked to evaluate an organization’s marketing practices. After your evaluation is complete, you must present your findings to the organization’s board of directors.

Conduct an observation of a local store, food chain, or box store to identify what tactics the organization uses to influence people to buy services or products based on attributions, attitude development, biases, and factors such as gender or age.

Focus on one section of the store and note how someone might be induced to buy a product because of how it’s marketed or presented.

Create a 10- to 12-slide PowerPoint® presentation with detailed speaker notes that includes the following: 

• Introduce the topic (1 slide).
• Choose 2 or 3 principles within social perception theory and describe them. These may be stereotyping, gender bias, in-group/out-group, attitude, reward, stereotype threat, or others (2–3 slides).
• Explain how your identified principles are used to persuade or condition consumers to buy the products (2–4 slides).
• Describe one illusory correlation or control that keeps consumers coming back. An example of an illusion correlation would be a health and beauty sign (1–2 slides).
• Summarize what you have learned from your observations (1 slide).
• References (1 slide)

Cite at least 2 academic or scholarly sources to support your assignment.