Name : Nurafiqah Bte Hj Zariful

Student ID Number : 0321196

Group : Monday 4pm – 6pm

Subject : Social Psychology

Submission Date : 27th April

Social Interaction, 18th April

The first lecture started off by introducing what the subject is

about. What is Social Psychology? From what I understand from the

lecture, this subject is about exploring or trying to understand

individual’s behavior based on the current situation they are

experiencing. According to slides, there are three types of interest

and they are Social perception, Social influence and Social

interactions. I have learnt that social perception is about forming an

impression of others based on available information, means that the

person have been judged based on what people see from social

networks for example, their behavior on taking selfies or captions on

Instagram or Facebook, the way they dress up and many more. Social

influence is the process by which one’s thoughts and actions are

affected by others, to be honest I am a bit confused on this. From

what I thought it might be is that individuals can get influence from

their friends’ behavior. From example of one goof friend of mine

during primary, she was about to be elected to join netball team but

her best friend has no interest at all in football so she decided to

change his interest in football to something that they can do together.

Social interaction defines the relationship between two or more

individuals. According to this interest, it can give a lot of different

example. Basically, it is about relationships of two or a group of many

friends. I have also learnt that individuals can achieve or perform

better than usual when competing with others rather than doing it

alone. Individuals tend to give more energy in the presence of others,

as they are afraid that they would get lower marks when compare to

the. Basically when competing with others, it challenged them to

achieve more. However, the opposite of this can also happened when

a group task is given. Individuals tend to make less effort of their

energy since the task was given to a group of more than one person to

do. If this were given as an individual task, they would work their butt

of to achieve their goals on their own. These two concepts are called

Social Facilitation and Social Loafing. I’m sure everyone can relate

these two concepts especially in doing individual tests or group

assignments. I personally would work as hard as I can to achieve more

on my test or individual assignments. And when it comes to group

tasks, I would feel a bit more relaxed in doing the works, as the marks

will be judged in a group performances, I just have to do some of the

work that have been divided. I don’t know why is that, but in a group

you just feel like doing what you need to do. While in individual you

tend to put “more” than what you should do. This reminds me of a

friend that have been in a group with me twice, it was frustrating to

see that he was not cooperating with the members at all. He was

always late or even worst, didn’t even come to every meeting. He only

started doing his task two days before the submission. But when I

noticed in doing individual work, he worked hard on it, he even chose

not to sleep to achieve what he able to do best. In the end he achieved

more than any of his members.

Giving the example on clothes, when one clothes is trending, 9 out

of 10 people would choose to own it. When all the cool kids are

wearing the clothe from ‘this store’, they tend to buy it from the

specific store to fit in with the crowd. This happens all the time when

one type of clothing is trending especially to women. The current

trend, for example, is Monochrome style (black and white clothes), it

was obviously seen from the photos I’ve seen in instagram or tumblr

or any other photography social networks, almost all people are

posing with their so called currently-trending monochrome style.

Self Concept, 19th April

The second lecture discusses on how we see ourselves, what type

of person we see ourselves as, looking at our feelings and many more.

Basically, it is about studying ourselves & it is a very important part in

psychology. Before studying other people in the field of social

psychology, we need to study ourselves, because we live with

ourselves 24/7, no one else knows who we really are except for

ourselves. I now know there is actually a difference between “I” and

“me” from the theories of two psychologists, both with a different

concept. It had me confused in the first few explanations, I mean of

course, who would expect that these two pronouns have differences

when they actually have the same meaning. I do get what James

concept meant; the “I” represents what we think about ourselves from

what we see from our behaviors. For example, “I think this dress is

too tight, I look fat wearing it.” While “me” represents what you feel

you are capable of, what others see you as. People can easily judge

your behavior from available information and by this it means from

social network that we have regularly use to express feelings and post

selfies.

I’ve also learned that we and I certainly can relate, cannot factually

explain our behaviors, as we tend to deny being influenced my media,

parental influence or other influence. Hence we cannot predict both

behavior & feeling, I always predict I would finish work days before

submission, but would always mispredict I wouldn’t procrastinate,

which I eventually would do. I have also experience how I

miscalculated feelings when I thought something funny, would be

insulting to some. Another major part of the lecture of Self Serving

Bias, which as I observes, is when someone thinks they are the perfect

humans, taking pride and credit for success while blaming other

factors for failure that completely doesn’t involve them. Self-serving

bias can be found everywhere and we would not know if it might be

the people we never expected or even ourselves, since we tend to

mispredict behaviors.

I can definitely relate when the lecturer explained about

distinctiveness. I myself have that kind of behavior. I would act

differently in front of my parents than I act in front of my friends. You

tend to be more crazier when you’re surrounded with your close

friend and when you’re in front of your parents you tend to be shy,

well behaved and controlled.

We also learnt about social comparison, when you compare your

situation is better when others are suffering the situation. We

enhance our self-esteem by feeling that we are better than other

people. This happens almost everyday I failed my exam. I’m sure most

parents also would do this. Every time I flunked my test my parents

would compare to a successful daughter of her sister. She would

asked to do better, or followed what my cousin was doing. Or if I did

not give any effort in cleaning the house when we have guest, my

parents would compare to my other cousin without a maid that they

can help clean or cook for their guest every time we came. My mom

would always say “Why cant you be hard-working like them?” Too me

by social comparing it could decrease the effort in improving at some

point. You tend to feel down about yourself, that you were not as good

as you expected when compare to others. Especially when parents or

cousins compare big exam’s mark such as O’level exam with your

siblings, I’ve experience this last year when my brothers just got their

O’level results, I only managed to get 6 O’s while both of my brothers

have achieved 7 O’s and 9 O’s, and my parent’s first reaction was

“What have you got before?” This can also be called self-discrepancy

theory that compares different internalized standards and analyzes

how we are affected by the gaps between them.

Persuasion, 26th April

Persuasion could also mean the same as Social influence; it defines

as attempts to influence others’ attitudes or behaviors. When you

think about persuasion, what comes to mind is some people might

think of advertising messages that urge viewers to buy a particular

product, while others might think of a candidate trying to convince

voters to rather choose him rather than the other. People may be

persuaded in different ways. When we do not know how to behave or

can’t define about ourselves, we tend to choose to copy other peoples’

behavior, especially to new and advertising. There are two different

ways to persuasion and they are central route and the peripheral

route. The central route involves the argument or the content of a

message. I have a friend who previously have addicted smoking weed

(currently trying to quit), it was all started when he and his brother

was being scolded by their parents to not go out at night. All they

want was to had fun, seemed like the way their parents act does not

work for them at all, they became more stress because of it and

started to do things they shouldn’t. So they chose to follow their

friends addictive just to get out of the stress they suffered at home.

The way their parents send the message to them was not helpful as

the message was only have made them stress.

When we think of persuasion, negative example are often the first

to come to mind, but persuasion can also be used as positive. Public

service campaigns that allow people to recycle and quit smoking are

one good example. Take my country for example, the Sultan have

created a law where smoking is prohibited in virtually all enclosed

public places and workplaces, on sidewalks and all means transport,

whoever refuse to follow the law, offenders will be facing a fine of up

to $1,000 Brunei dollar. He even banned the import of any tobacco

product to the country. These actions are great examples or

persuasion used to improve people’s lives.

According to my experience, my parents have always never agreed

on me having a boyfriend. They give advice almost everyday to

convince me that they were always right. At first I tend to not listen to

them and just give a go, but one day when they found out about it,

they advice me more detailed giving me the chance if I were to follow

what they have motivate me, they would provide me a better future

education, and once I have done my study, I can follow my own

choice. I can say that this was a positive force of persuasion as they

were giving me rewards for listening to them.

Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination, 25th April

This lecture digs deeper into attitudes, such as the 3

components, looking at examples such as racism, sexism and

ageism to further understanding them. We looked at how people

are affected by a stimulus and how they respond to the stimulus in

a positive or negative way.

Stereotypes and prejudice have a pervasive and often pernicious

influence on our responses to others, and also in some case on out

own behaviors too. As taking racism, sexism and ageism to a real

life example, it could usually be found in wars. But take this

semester for example, we as Taylor’s University’s student

represents a lot of international students that consists of Black,

Chinese and Malays. A semester ago the students was well mixed

with each other. But despite our best intentions, we end up making

friends only with people who are similar to us and perhaps even

avoiding people whom we see as different from each other. It can

obviously be seen that, a group of race or religion are in the same

group, not mixing with different race or religion. Discrimination is

a major societal problem because it is so pervasive, takes so many

forms, and has such negative effects on so many people.

We also learnt about social learning where parents are the most

influenced source of information. What I have noticed in real life

example, mostly from my relatives, if the father is a smoker, his son

or it can be daughter in some cases, are likely to become a smoker

too and even more addictive than their father (the person who they

have influenced to).

In conclusion, I’ve learned how a group can change people in a

positive or negative way and that people can behave in an

unexpected way. We like some people and we dislike others, this is

natural, but we should not let a people’s skin color, gender, age,

religion, or ethnic background make these determinations for us.

Prosocial Behavior, 25th Arpril

In Chapter 8 we learned about prosocial behavior. Why we help

and why we don’t. It talked about how we help others can benefit us, a

positive actions we tend to hope we can do those who needed. There

are two differences in this behavior, egoistic model and altruistic

model. Egoistic model explains when we tend to help others for the

sake of own benefits only, not thinks about others benefit. It focuses

on rewards that self received. One thing that most people nowadays

has in common. While altruistic model is the opposite of egoistic

model, it is when we help others for selfless reasons, not receiving

benefit in return. It involves the unselfish concern for other people,

doing things simply out of a desire to help, not because you feel

obligated to out of duty, loyalty or religious reasons. This model can

be found in everyday act, from people helping you to open the door as

you walk outside the grocery store, people who gives 1 Ringgit to

homeless man who sit along the street hoping for enough money to

eat everyday.

The lecturer had explained about bystanders, which is when people

are less likely to help others when they are in groups because they

believe others would help or because they don’t want to take

responsibility of a bystander. The more people on the event, the lesser

of help they will get. If it was not an emergency, then nothing was to

be done about it because nobody sees it as a problem. Mood effects

social behaviors when the person that needed help happens to be

attractive, help can be done when you are in a positive mood while

when you’re in a negative mood, you tend to choose not to help. And

you also more likely to help to people that have same kind as yours for

example same race, same school or same religion. This reminds me of

a friend who totally ignored one of our members just because he has

different race than hers. We also learnt about cost benefit analysis, if

you were going to help someone what cost benefit do you get, if there

is a less cost and more benefit then more likely people would help.

About altruistic model, it reflects a lot to my dad. Years ago before

my grandfather passed away, he would visit his farther almost

everyday, he even stayed until midnight if he needed to. He

remembered every schedule of when his father needed to take

medicine. He sometimes would forgot about his meals just because of

taking care of his father. It was a very good example to his children at

the moment, taking care of your loved ones once you have the chance.

It may not give you any reward, but you will gain respect from others.