1. Social psychology - Journal 4
Recently, we had a test for social psychology consisting of 50 objective questions. I think
it wasn’t that hard and at the same time not very easy too. This is because the whole test is based
on pretty much just reading and memorizing. However, the hard part was I didn’t really know
what I was reading because I have never taken a subject like social psychology before and also
remembering the various terms. I’ve read about independent and interdependent and also about
self-serving bias and how it works.
Other chapters include the topic on vision where it explains how the eyes work and how
they perceive things. This topic didn’t need much reading as it was mainly picture. All I had to
do was memorize the terms that labeled each illusion. I also read things on attitudes, operant
conditioning and observational behavior.
Overall, I tend to think of social psychology as a subject that is based on common sense
because most of the things I’ve learned are what we humans would normally do in real life and it
doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand these kind of things that would even make sense to
children.
Social psychology - Journal 5
In this topic, we were taught about group behavior and conformity which is basically
about the behavior of the society in different situations. Conformity is a kind of social influence
that is kind of like peer pressure where the individual does something just to fit into society. We
had the privilege to watch videos again. These videos were about how people will react to certain
situations, situations which were created by a group of people that wants to study how others
think.
There was one video about how many electric shocks can the participants give to the
individual who was actually an actor. I’ve got to admit that video was hilarious. Another video
was about the bystander effect whereby the situation created was a girl screaming while being
kidnapped by a man to see how bystanders will react. Sure enough, the results were that the
bystanders just watched the girl and walked on. Finally after many attempts there was only one
case in which the bystanders actually attended to the situation. For these kinds of situation, I
have to confess that I may also just walk by suspecting that the girl is just disobeying her father.
After all we do live in a world where not everything maybe what they seem.