Name : Chan Zhuang Sheng

ID : 0314527

Course : FNBE April Intake

Social Psychology Journal

18.12.2013

Social Psychology 4

In this week, I had learned about the attitudes and social judgements and I felt this topic

was very complicated to me. This topic discussed about the changing of attitudes and behaviours

in different ways. Attitudes can be changed by 3 components such as cognitive component,

affective component and behavioural component. The factors that made these 3 components

changed a person were source, message and receiver. Different ways of conversations would

affect the thinking and respond of the other people. As an example, people felt scared when you

told something scary to him or her. Besides, primary reinforcers and secondary reinforcers were

taught in the class. Primary reinforcer is more focusing on satisfaction of biological needs, while

secondary reinforcer is conditioned reinforcement. Furthermore, I realised the differences

between positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is a

reinforcement that can push someone to do something that provides them advantages, while

negative reinforcement is the opposite of positive reinforcement.Moreover, I learned that high

dissonance about counterattitudinal behaviour will cause attitude change.

Social Psychology 5

This time, Miss Chia had taught us conformity and group behaviour. First was

conformity, conformity was the act of beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that will be changed by

social pressure which means people will change their decision based on situation. From what I

know is people will follow what majority do although they have strong determination on their

decision. This is why people cannot follow their own way to do their stuff because of not

believing themselves. Besides, there is another way of conformity which is people will follow

what their boss call them to do without thinking the pros and cons. There are no dissenters

between them, they are the followers. Furthermore, an experiment which was called Stanford

Prison Experiment was taken to test the conformity of prisoners. The experiment had proved the

impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social

and institutional support. It also illustrates cognitive dissonance theory and the power of

authority. I learned that group behaviour is a behaviour that many people had brought up. It does

make sense to me. Group behaviour contains bystander effect which is the effect when people

will less likely to help when they are in group than when alone. It is a very common

phenomenon in today’s world. As an example, people will not help a person who is having

difficulties when they are a lot of people, they think about they do not have the responsibilities to

help such person. However, there is benefit of group behaviour such as a team of people will

outperform a work than do it alone. In group work, the progress will be faster and more efficient.

There are lot of ways to figure out conformity and group behaviour, both of them have their own

advantages and disadvantages to this community.