1. Name:
Muhammad Haziq bin HjZariful
Student ID:
0314131
Module:
Social Psychology
Lecturer:
Ms. Pang Chia Yee
Course:
Foundation of Natural & Built Environment, April Intake
Class:
Tuesday, 3.30pm
Type of Assignment: Journal
2. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY JOURNAL 2
Entry 1 (Attitudes – Components & Theorists)
Business student would understand the definition of attitudes, how it can change& it’s
impact to a company, as we have learnt about not long before this lecture, however, this
lecture digs deeper into attitudes, such as the 3 components of attitudes & the factors that
affect one’s change in attitudes. We learned the components of attitudes are emotions,
what the person would do & their beliefs, looking at examples such as sexism and gun
control to further understand them.
We then looked at the 3 theories of attitude change learning, studying each theory in
detail. For Operant conditioning, we looked at how people are affected by a stimulus
&how they respond to the stimulus in a positive or negative way, looking at real life
examples to relate to such as studying for a test. We focused on B.F. Skinner’s study &
the Skinner box. Looking at his original video about Operant conditioning & how a
rat’s/pigeon’s behavioral change is calculated in a recorder. The Skinner box also teaches
us the different types of schedules we can do in an observational experiment such as
Fixed Ratio & Variable Interval. The Skinner box teaches how the rat strengthens its
responses by reinforcements & how it applies to real life scenarios such as food &
money. Moreover, the experiment also teaches how a behavior can gradually stop by
negative reinforcements as punishments.
Next we learnt about Observational learning& the 4 key processes to the type of
behavioral change. We first looked an old controversial video of children who observed a
video of a person aggressively playing with a Weeble just because they’ve observed a
video of a ‘model’. We then looked at another video about how octopi are learning
through models of other octopi, where scientists place a crab in a box & how octopi
observe other models and successfully learned how to obtain the crab after viewing the
model only once. After that, we looked at mass shootings in the USA & learned thatit
was caused by observational learning from media violence, looking at statistics & data
that proved so.
3. Entry 2 (Conformity and Group Behavior)
On the first part of the lecture, we learned about Conformity, which is a social influence
on how people change beliefs or behavior because of how the majority of people in the
group have a different belief or behavior. I can definitely relate when, a semester ago, a
project group I was in agreed to a decision while the group leader changed her decision
even after she stood by her point & view before that. I was also a victim of conformity
countless times before which made it easier for me to understand the effects of how a
group of people can change people’s views.
The next part of the lecture is about Obedience, we learned &were shown a video of
Stanley Milgram’s experiment, which is about how long people, would take on
electroshocking someone if he writes a wrong answer. People would take a long time to
stop because of how orders were given to them. I’ve coincidentally watched a similar
video months ago, but it was to study how psychopathic a human can be, however, the
video I watched has the same reasons on why people would continue such as gender &
occupation.
We also studied about Zimbardo’s Prison experiment, which is when a group of students
are assigned to prison guards & prisoners which hypothesizes the cause of abusive
behavior in prison is by the in-built personality traits of the prisoners & guards. The
experiment showed that even the toughest jock in the university can lose his sanity
whereas even the shy girls picked to be the prison guards became abusive & aggressive,
showing everyone have a devil inside of them.
Lastly, we learned about the Bystander effect, 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. We viewed a video that experiments
this effect, a video of an actor who plays a kidnapper who kidnaps a 5 year old. Only a
few were shown to help while others were affected by the Bystander effect.
In conclusion, I’ve learned how a group can change people in a positive or negative way
& that people can behave in an unexpected way
