Discovering the self
In order to discover about the self, people might find themselves attempting to answer some the following questions: what am I actually like? Am I kind of person who is introverted or extraverted? Am I optimistic or pessimistic? Am I impulsive or organized? How would I define myself whenever I am called upon to describe myself to others? What are the obvious characteristics about me that I would first mention when describing myself? In most cases people would use personality characteristics to describe themselves. This includes traits such as shyness, introversion, extraversion or impulsive. The underlying thing is that it does not matter the characteristics that someone focuses on when describing their own self. The most valuable thing is how individuals evaluate their own selves. This means, do they generally see themselves in a negative or positive way.
As it can be noted from the discussion above, there are many ways in which people can define themselves. The issue of interest to social psychology is identifying how the different views come into place. Social psychology is also interested in identifying the effect these characteristics have in terms of influencing behavior. This interest on the way individuals view themselves is relatively recent however, in the past, social psychology mainly emphasized criterias that influences persons by situations. The old approach was manipulative of the futures of the situation to see what see the effect it had on behavior. Essentially, in this approach, people were thought to be similar and interchangeable; the focus was on the role of environmental factors.
More recently, contemporary social psychology has noted the pivotal role played by stable characteristics of the individuals. This means that it is not only the situations that tend to make people act in a similar manner but there are people who will maintain their behaviors despite the situation. Therefore one salient feature of social psychology in the modern days is the realization that personality variables such as self esteem and shyness can be important influences on human behavior. This growing emphasis on the self has coincided with modern social psychology devoting considerable attention to understanding the notion of the concept of self. This implies, how people go about acquiring knowledge of the self and organizing this knowledge in a way such that it will influence their thoughts, feeling and actions.
The concept of the self is likened to an irritating television jingle. This means that it is hard to get the concept of the self out of an individual’s head. Whatever, people do, taste, embrace, create, or learn, will be filtered out through the self. Even during the process of dreaming, the self and the id are at the center of it all. Sometimes it is referred to as self awareness, self identity, the mind, consciousness, or even soul. However, no matter what term is used to refer to the concept of the self, it is something that sets apart one individual from others and it is intrinsic to the human condition.
Even though the concept of self awareness may seem to be natural and inevitable, social psychologists do not take its existence for granted. They are engaged asking questions aimed at understanding the concept further. They intend to understand the good that the concept has anyway.
The self concept is each person’s conscious of his or her total, essential or particular being. Included in self concept is all of our physical, social, psychological perception about ourselves. These perceptions are a result of our past, present, projected experiences and interactions with our environments. The two main components of self concept include, self esteem and self image. Self image refers to that is self-destructive of the self while self esteem is the evaluative aspect of self concept. People develop pictures of themselves and believe that they are a certain kind of individual. Self esteem includes evaluative feelings that indicate how people relate to themselves.
Self efficacy is the ability of an individual to produce the right results. People would normally struggle to be effective. It all starts with the perception of self actualization as designated by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs. According to Carl Rogers a self actualized person functions fully is highly effective with high self esteem.
Thinking about others
In this section, the paper shall focus mainly on the issue of social cognition attributes, attitudes, behaviors, prejudice, stereotype or discrimination. First we begin by attribution. Attribution can be said to be the belief that a situation or event is caused by something. If for instance, people attribute a particular statement to someone, they believe that that person must have said it. It is a common thing to find people having the false consensus effect. If someone was to be asked on their opinion about an issue, they would probably provide an answer and assume that a majority of the population believe the same way he or she does.
The general estimate of what people think of an issue is usually influenced by the opinion of individuals. In other words people make assumptions about how other think. Also it could be understood in this manner; people believe that their own attitudes and preferences are relatively common in the population. The main emphasis on attribution is the thought process people engage whenever they think about others. Thus the emphasis of attribution in social psychology is on how people think and not the content of the thoughts they develop.
For instance one overriding issue to those who study social cognition is what happens to the information that people acquire about others? How information is stored and organized in the memory? How is it accessed and retrieved later on? After retrieval, how is it used to help people develop an understanding and interpretation of the world around them? In response to questions such as these, a significant amount of empirical evidence suggest that information about the self, group, places, and activities is stored in memory in the form of schemas. Schemas is mental structures that contain information relevant to some concept or stimuli. The schemas are extremely important to humans in a number of ways. One such importance is that it influences the way in which people interpret and encode new information. In many instances, people are likely to remember and notice new information if it is consistent with information in the existing schemas. Schemas also appear to exert an influence in the kind of judgment we make towards other people. Attitude towards a new acquaintance who is a member of identifiable group can be significantly influenced if our existing schemas for anything relating to that group are negative. Much of research about attribution and social cognition is focused on understanding how cognitive schemas are developed, changed, and the manner that they affect our thoughts feelings and actions.
The study of attitudes in social psychology has been the center of concern in the field. It is in fact the major concern that everything about social psychology revolves around. One major approach in the recent studies in social psychology is focused on the where attitudes come from. The evidence from this research suggests that we acquire attitudes not only from careful consideration of facts but also through processes that are much less conscious and deliberate. Merely being exposed to some objects frequent enough for example generally leads to a more favorable attitude towards it. It also appears that we sometimes arrive at our attitudes by merely looking at our behaviors and then simply inferring what our attitudes must be based on our actions.
Another approach to the topic of attitude has been to examine the basic assumption mentioned above, namely that attitudes are strongly associated with actual behavior. However, the link between attitudes and behaviors might not as powerful or reliable as thought although under the right circumstances, it is still possible to predict behavior from attitudes and vise versa.
During the colonial period, very few people were allowed to vote. Women African Americans, and whites who did not have property could not vote. The tendency of humans to make negative judgments about others on the basis of their membership to some social group and then acting on those judgments is what is referred as prejudice, discrimination or stereotyping. Even though the three topics are distinct, they are related in one way or the other. This tendency is so powerful and although progress has been made to curb the problem caused, it still exists within the modern society.
Prejudice refers to an irrational hatred and suspicion of individuals of a different nature particularly on gender, religion or race. A good example of prejudice is the feeling of distaste that one can have when he or she encounters members of a minority group, a woman for that matter, or a person from a low social class. Discrimination refers to the practice of treating an individual unfairly. Prejudice is confined into feelings, but discrimination crosses the line and makes the individual behave in a negative manner. A practical example is when a person yells a racial slur or refuses to employ a worker from a specific minority group because of the fact that they belong to a minority group. On the other hand, stereotype refers to a perception or notion that an individual's existence. Stereotypes is often partial or untrue. Stereotyping is different in given in positive or negative but the underlying thing is that it is not true.
Influencing others: persuasion
Persuasion comes from the act of persuading or convincing someone to do something. To persuade refers to making someone have a feeling of doing something for a particular reason. Persuasion unquestionably involves speech. There are specific characteristics that persuasive people must have in order to achieve their goals of convincing people. One such characteristic is the ability to argue. Persuasive arguments involve the use reasoning and the individual are expected to have the ability to engage in critical thinking and base the persuasive arguments on evidence. It is because of the evidence that people are able to believe the argument and take it as a fact. However when there is not convincing evidence, the persuasive argument will be considered not persuasive after all.
Influencing other: obedience and conformity
Conformity and obedience refers to behaviors that obeys generally accepted norms of a particular group. There are several factors that help people to conform and become obedient people in the society. They include unanimity of a social group, cohesiveness of a social group, personality of the individual, self awareness of people, self presentation, behavior modeling, and information about others.
Aggression is an anti conformity behavior. Aggression is often referred to as an angry or threatening behavior or feelings that often result in fighting. In aggression, it may not imply that the individual intends to cause harm. When social psychology conducts its research on aggression may sometimes overlook the fact that there are biological factors that contribute to the aggressive behaviors in people.
Prosocial behavior consists of actions that are intended to be of benefit to others in the society. They happen voluntarily. These actions may include helping the needy in the society, volunteering one’s services to help others, sharing of things, donation, and cooperation. Motivation for these actions may come as a result of the epithetical feeling people develop or as a result of the concerns about the rights and welfare of others. The factors that lead to conformity discussed above, can also contribute to development of prosociality of individual people in the society. Basically, prosocial behaviors contribute to desirable characteristics in people within a society.
They contribute to building of positive relationships between people in the society. Research has consistently demonstrated that having a large amount of by standers can actually reduce the amount of help or aid given. This phenomenon is called the by standers intervention. People within a large group is less likely to offer help to someone who has fallen, for example, compared to the same scenario in a small group. Other researches focus on uncovering the different kinds of motivation that lead people to help others.
Group dynamics:
The main focus of social psychologists when it comes to conducting studies on group dynamics is what happens when people meet in groups. What are the chances of every one succeeding when they meet in groups? A very interesting line of research into how groups can reach bad decisions is a phenomenon called group think. According to this approach, highly cohesive groups frequently develop a mindset characterized by secretiveness over confidence and illusion of invulnerability. The main consequence of group think is the ability of the members to have impeded thoughts such that they can easily follow the crowd even if their activities and mindsets are wrong.
Other approaches to group dynamics in social psychology focus on the fact that when groups have to choose a course of action, they make a choice that is more extreme than the decision of each individual alone. Social dilemma involved in group dynamics include questions such as why do normal people get appealed by cults? The methods of social compliance also apply to the wrong groups as long as the group is highly cohesive.
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