Reflective journal of the lectures from Social Psychology classes

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. JOURNAL: Self Concept
The lecture discusses on how we see ourselves, what type of person we see
ourselves as, looking at our feelings, etc. 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. The lecture started off with
the whole class expressing ourselves, showing whom we are & what our traits are. Before
knowing the spotlight effect, I’ve already felt the effect when conducting this activity,
how we have a positive view of ourselves. I've also come to acknowledge more of my
friends, as we discuss who we are among groups, then to the class. I’ve also learned that
we and I certainly can relate, cannot factually explain our behavior, as we tend to deny
being influenced by media, parental influence or other influences. Hence we cannot
predict both behavior & feeling, I always predict I would finish work days before
submission, but would always mispredict that 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 is Self
Serving Bias, which as I observed, is when someone thinks they are the perfect humans,
taking pride & credit for success while blaming other factors for failure that completely
doesn’t involve them. Self-serving bias can be found everywhere & we would not know
if it might be the people we never expected or even ourselves, since we tend to mispredict
behavior. At the end of the lecture, we conducted another activity called the Happy StepIn. Honestly, I was a bit lost up until copying posture & the way they breathe, since I was
imagining a group of people & they all breathe & stand in different ways, so I was lost at
that moment but it was still good to imagine the people I love in front of me & thinking
positively refreshed my mind & body.

3. JOURNAL: The Powers of Perils & Institutions
This lecture was a rather short lecture, one of the reasons is because the architect
students need to rush on submitting assignments & another is because there were
only a few slides to cover, therefore, I honestly had a hard time digging through my
mind what I learned, although I was able to know the basic general idea. The lecture
is about the way we think. I’ve learned that we either think controllably, when
making decisions, analyzing circumstances, etc. while Automatic thinking is when
we effortlessly without noticing that we were processing information into our brain.
I started reminiscing & thinking of the different scenarios I’ve been through that
involves both controlled & automatic thinking. Of course, I was able to think about
controlled thinking easily, but Automatic thinking was more difficult since we were
unconscious when it happened. I’ve also learned that people tend to underestimate
the time period we need to complete a task. This would lead to an unorganized
schedule, failing to attend meetings or even a loss in finance when it involves
money. We then were asked if we agree or disagree that memories are stored to be
withdrawn later & tend to be lost. I initially agreed to the concept, until the next
slide came in, that we couldn’t remember a moment as it is, it might be changed in
time. I initially agreed because I thought I retrieved the exact copy of a moment,
when actually, I didn’t realized some events were changed; I just assumed I got the
right information. Lastly, I’ve learned that we change attitudes over time, where
there would be time when we turn rebellious as a teenager.

4. JOURNAL: Visuals
The lecture on Vision started off by knowing how our vision works, so we know how
our eyes see the different parts of the lecture that we are studying such as color or
illusions. We studied the different rays of light, the structure of the eye, how our
pupils & lens adjust to darkness or light. I can easily understand since I’ve learned
about them in high school. After that we covered on colors & what psychological
effect it gives to us, learning that different colors give different effect on humans. We
then learned about the different combinations of color that shows if it is either good,
bad, strong, weak, active or passive. To me, I disagreed with the theory, as I believe
that we admire the colors we grow up with, the colors we see on television, the
colors of our backyard, etc. I continued to stand to my theory, until we watched the
video about color. The video explains the psychological effect of color & that it can
be found everywhere in the world but what proved me wrong about my theory was
that the attractiveness to color changes in time, through decades, color
attractiveness change, where we are now attracted to modern color such as black &
white, which I am attracted to. That part of the video was my favorite. We then
studied the different perceptions that our brain sees in images that show two
interpretations, the Reversible figure. We continued by looking through examples of
such images until we watched a video about the gorilla with the people passing the
ball. I counted the wrong number of passes by 1, but I did see the gorilla. We
progressed through the lecture by looking through the types of illusions our brain
perceive, such as the figure and ground, proximity, closure, Linear perspective,
similarity, relative size, all were given image examples. My favorite part of them all
was the Albert Einstein board, which were given videos and images to explain. I was
confused up until the last video, because I couldn’t see a difference. In the last part
of the lecture, we looked at pictures optical illusions, which really hurt my eyes, but
was fun.