FINAL COUNTDOWN ! FINAL WEEK !  SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY !


Muqaddimah
Almost a month and a half had passed by, and now we're entering the final of week of Summer Semester ! Woo! Felt like Summer began only yesterday. It's amazing how time flies fast when we enjoy the company of the people we know and classes that we attend but it's also important to note that the Final Examinations are also coming! Yikes ! Anyhow, Social Psychology is the final chapter in the Syllabus of Introduction of Psychology, and here I am, Izwan Zhuqairy, writing a post on the chapter. It intrigues me when in reality, humans are mostly influenced by the surroundings mainly the people around through feelings, behaviors or even thoughts. This is Social Psychology, and it is a subject of interest for me and throughout the class conveyed by Sir Wafiy, I paid full attention ;)

Why do we need to learn social psychology?

We can better understand how groups impact our choices and actions. Additionally, it also allows us to gain a greater appreciation for how our social perceptions affect our interactions with other people.

We shall look first at SOCIAL INFLUENCE. Social influence is where anyone can influence another person through Conformity, Compliance, and also Obedience.

Conformity is the change of behaviour of a person to match others. 
Compliance however, is the change of behaviour upon a request of another person. This is amazing.

There are 4 ways to gain Compliance! Note this! Perhaps can be useful in daily life hehe

The first way is Foot-in-the-door technique, an easy to be imagined technique. When we ask someone for a small favor or commitment (after knocking a door of our neighbors' house, perhaps to borrow a bicycle to go to a supermarket), then so our neighbor agrees (he or she gives compliance) But, we put on our foot in the door that is closing to ask for another bigger favor or commitment such as borrowing the bicycle to go to other places other than the supermarket, like going to our Grandma's house and visit a friend.

Next is the Door-in-the-face technique, this technique is somehow the inverse of the first technique in a sense that we ask for a large commitment first, then after not gaining a compliance, we ask for a smaller commitment. Inverting the first example, we ask to borrow a bicycle to go the supermarket, Grandma's house and visit a friend. But our neighbor refuses to allow that so we asked to only ride it to go to the supermarket only.

Thirdly is the Lowball technique, most commonly used in world of sales. After giving someone a commitment that is accepted, more and more commitment comes after that. Say for example, a car salesperson says that a car starts at a low price of RM12 000, and during the sales process he introduces extras that needs to be paid as well which adds to the price and becomes more expensive.

Finally the That's-not-all-technique, a technique that pulls people to gain compliance by adding few more extras to an offer. For example, a car salesperson decide to give extras such as automatic sliding door, LCD screen television and etc for free if a customer wants to buy a car that he is selling.

Obedience finally is the change of behavior of a person by instruction of someone with more power (authority).



Task Performance

• Social Facilitation is a positive impact given to a person doing a task with the presence of other people.
• Social Impairment is a negative impact given to a person doing a task with the presence of other people.
• Social Loafing (also known as free-riding) is when a person puts less effort in a task that involves group of people

Social Cognition
Focus on the way perceivers encode, process, remember, and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of other people's behavior.
Under Social Cognition, there are Attitude, Impression Formation, Attribution

Attitude
It's basically how we humans respond to ideas of other people positively or negatively.

In the formation of attitude, they are a number of influences. Namely,

• Direct Contact – formed by direct contact with the person, idea, situation, or object that is the focus of the attitude
• Direct Instruction – direct instruction given by parents or some other individual
  • (Example: Telling smoking cigarettes is dangerous & unhealthy)
• Interaction with others – the person is around other people with that attitude
• Vicarious Conditioning (Observational Learning) – learned through observation of other people’s action and reactions to various objects, people, or situations

What's more interesting that attitude can be shaped by persuasion. However, there are few factors that make a successful persuasion.

1. Source – The communicator that must be trustworthy or knowledgeable
2. Message – Should convey the positive and negative side of an argument towards the audience 
3. Target Audience – The characteristics of the people who are intended of the message of persuasion. Younger people are easily influenced.

Cognitive Dissonance

What is that? Cognitive Dissonance is when a person has a conflicting behavior and attitude. For example, a person continues to smoke and that's a bad behavior however, the person thinks that he or she can still live longer.

Cognitive Dissonance can be corrected by the following steps:

1. Change their conflicting behavior to match it with their attitude
   “Quit smoking when knowing that smoking is dangerous and could cut short lives”
2. Change their current conflicting cognition to justify their behavior
   “Change their thought attitude on smoking by searching for journal that telling smoking is not factor of lung cancer to justify their behavior of smoking cigarettes.”
3. Form new cognition to justify their behavior “Buying cigarettes with less tobacco, which is less dangerous than cigarettes with heavy tobacco".

Impression

First impression matters. Impression is the first knowledge of a person.

Attribution

It is how we explain our own behaviors and others.

Now we move on to Social Interaction.

Prejudice

Prejudice is simply a negative attitude held inside us towards members of a group of people. Discrimination is a way of action in which the prejudiced group is treated differently in a negative manner.

A social group that is identified as "us", is called "In-groups", while a social group that is identified as "they" are called "out-groups"

Scapegoating, a term to describe prejudice by in-groups who have more social power over those who are in out-groups. Immigrants coming to a new country are usually subject to scapegoating.

Interpersonal attraction is the liking or having a desire for a relationship with another person. This is typical for all humans hehe and attraction to people has its own rules. What? Rules? Wow!

The rules are !

• Promixity - which is how close a person is to someone physically or geographically
• "Opposites attract"/Complementarity - People tend to like others who are similar to themselves, or even different.
• Reciprocity of liking - Tendency of people to like others who like them in return
• Birds of feather (Similarity) - Sound romantic in my opinion haha, but it is the tendency of people to like being with someone that are similar to them
• Physical Attractiveness - Ahh, humans tend to like others who are attractive without no doubt.

Love is a TRIANGLE, my friend.

What? Triangle? No, it doesn't mean that we form a love triangle relationship. That's bad. In Psychology, there's a theory called Stenberg's Triangular Theory of Love.

Voila! The triangle!

Love is a feeling of strong affection to another person due to kinship, personal ties, sexual attraction, admiration, or even common interests.

The three main components of love are:

1.Intimacy (which are feelings of closeness, psychologically not physically)

2.Passion (physical aspect of love emotional and sexual arousal a person feels to other such as holding hands, hug, loving looks. Woops, dont think too much)

3.Commitment (decisions one makes about a relationship, in a serious manner).

Now we've come to and end, I'd like to thank Sir Wafiy for his awesome teachings in class as well as supporting friends from Chicago. You guys are the best! 

STRESSSS!!!!!

     
    Prior to the topic for this week, I am sure that all of us are familiar with this word. Stress. What do you know about stress? Literally, what does stress means? And what causes us become stress. Does writing this blog makes us stress or stress is just our feeling about it?  Stress also can occur to all people, from a street hawker to a CEO of a company, all of them experience stress. Now, on this post I will elaborate and make it clear to all of you what is stress and all the elements of stress plus with the ways to manage stress.

   Now we start with what does the word stress means. From my previous class, stress is the word used to describe the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to event that we perceive as threatening or challenging. In the easier word, stress is how you response to events that happen in your life. Cognitive here means all of the process that involve when we are thinking. Now you have know the meaning of stress, let's proceed to the cause of stress which is called stressor. 

Stressors

 Stressor is the events that cause a stress reaction. Stressor can be a daily event in our life such as get awake early at the morning or something much more bigger event such as the earthquake and flood. Surely, the people in Ranau, Sabah probably will experience stress resulted from the earthquake and I feel sympathy for them. 

  

 The way we perceive the stressor can effect the consequences of stress in our life. Stressors can be classified into two categories : eustress and distress. Eustress is mainly about the positive effect of stress. It is also can be related by the adequate amount of stress that can promote health and good attitude towards us. As an example, as a college student may perceive examination week as a stressful week. However, researchers stated that the stress that the student experienced during the examination week is actually helping them to success in their examination. This is because the stress that the student experienced is actually drive the student to put extra effort in their study, thus their examination result will show great mark. However, if the college student fail to cope with the stress, as they found that the burden to revise their study is too big and unaccomplished, they will fail in managing the pressure and will lead to terrible examination result. This effect of this undesirable stimulus which is the burden to revise the subject is called distress. 

Cognitive Factors of Stress 

Cognitive Appraisal Approach is about the mind set of people on thinking about a stressor will effect on how the stressor will be stressful or not. According to Richard Lazarus, there are two process which will determine the how stressful a stressor will be. The steps are primary appraisal and secondary appraisal.

Primary Appraisal

Primary appraisal is the first step whether the stressor is classified as a threat, challenge or a harm or loss to the individual. It also determine whether the stressor as a threat or not. As an example, a student will think that he or she will fail in the upcoming examination as he or she does not attending the class for a month. So, they will perceive the absence of a month will become a threat to them as they do not have the knowledge to face the examination.It the student has studied well in his class, then the student should not have problems in facing the examination and hence no stress occur to the student. 

Secondary Appraisal 

If the person perceive the stressor as a threat to them, they will find the available resources to overcome the stressor. Resources such as social support, money, time, energy and other potential resources can be used to deal with the stressor. As an example, for the student that doesn't has absence for a month in the class, he or she can use another ways to overcome the problems in revising and acquiring the knowledge such as make a group discussion with friends to accelerate the gaining of knowledge. Then, with this method, the student can cope with the stressor and success in the upcoming examination. 

OK. Now let's move on to the causes of stress, As we all know, the causes of stress can be as small as annoying sound of a crying baby to the big event such as earthquake and flood. 

Causes of Stress

The first cause of stress is catastrophe. Catastrophe means an unpredictable event that occurs in a large scale and usually causes terrible effect to the people. Hurricane, tornado, earthquake, tsunami are examples of catastrophe.

Sabah earthquake also cause the damage on buildings.

Major live events can also contribute to stress. Every experience of a person has can be the cause of stress. The adjustments made on certain event happened in our life will sometimes cause stress. Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe believe that any event in life that require adjustments and changes can lead to stress, They made a scale named Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) to measure the amount of stress in a person life by including the major life event which propose certain value known as life change unit. In this scale, the death of spouse is ranked on the highest position and minor violations of the law is among the lowest. 

SRRS scale

There is another scale that is specifically designed for college student. It is called College Undergraduate Stress Scale (CUSS). It is different than SRRS as it is more focus on life events that could happen to college student.

CUSS scale

Hassles or daily annoyances can also contribute to stress. We often heard about student live in a boarding school get bullied by other student. Bully fall in this category. Hassles are differ according to age and environment. As an example an old man maybe experiencing difficulty in reading without glasses and a small child maybe having a problem being teased by their friends. These daily annoyances can lead to mental stress as it is an unfavorable condition for them. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS IN STRESS

Pressure

Pressure is when a person having a urgent demand to do something. It will cause the person to work harder and quicker. The example of pressure is when a cartoonist needs to send the cartoon on the deadline day. The cartoonist has a pressure on himself in completing the works faster to meet the deadline day. 

Uncontrollability

Uncontrollability is where a person does not has the power or capacity in a particular situation. Lack of power to control the situation will cause stress as we somehow like incapable in dealing with the situation. As an example, a doctor will experience stress if he cannot save a patient live because lack of equipment in the hospital. 

Frustration

Frustation happens when people are blocked from achieving their desired goal. Frustation can lead to persistent which the person will do anything to overcome the frustation. Aggression is another response to frustation and it will cause harm to other people. For less threatening effect, displaced aggression occurs when people released their stress caused by frustration to another things or people. There is another way to response to frustration which is escape or withdrawal. During escape, drugs are used to make the people forget about the stressors and stress for a short time. This method however is not permanent to escape from the stress. 

Conflict

There are four types of conflict:

- Approach-approach conflict

A person should choose between two desired and attractive goals

- Avoidance-avoidance conflict

A person should choose between two undesired and goals

- Approach-avoidance conflict

One goal has it own pro and cons and a person should choose whether to agree it or not.

- Multiple approach-avoidance conflict

A person may has two or more goals or options to consider and it is the most difficult one as it involves many options to be weight up.

PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTIONS TO STRESS

Autonomic nervous system is the system that responsible to involuntary actions to manage stress.

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)  is mainly about on how our body react when adapting to certain stressor. There are three main stages in GAS which are alarm, resistance and exhaustion.

Example on how GAS works

SOCIAL FACTORS INFLUENCE STRESS REACTIONS

Poverty

Lack of accomodation can lead to stress. The main problem for people nowadays is money. Without money, all things will be difficult for us. The failure to get money will lead to hardship in life that increases the stress among people. 

Poverty in a village

Job Stress

Many stressor can occur in a workplace such as racism, huge workload and unfair policy among the worker. The condition of the workplace could contribute to the stress among the workers too. 

Culture

Acculturation is the process to adapting to new culture and the dominant culture will be the dominant one. There are four categories of acculturation which are :

- Integration

- Assimilation

- Separation

-Marginalization

COPING WITH STRESS

There are two methods to cope with stress which are :

-Problem-focused coping

This is the method where we try to eliminate the sources of the stress itself.

-Emotion-focused coping

This method focus on our feeling towards the stressor. We can cope with stress if we change our feeling on the stressor itself. It will reduce the emotional impact on us thus makes us to deal with the stressor more efficiently.

-Meditation

Meditation is the exercise on out mental process to help us refocus to achieve calmness in our consciousness mind. There is concentrative meditation which focus the mind to forgot the daily problems and stresses by focusing to repetitive unchanged stimulus in our body (heartbeat). Meditation helps to prevent chronic pain and depression. 

Think Tanker

It's time for another post on this blog. Guess what, it's already the fourth week though our summer semester. Test, quizzes, not to mention assignments, we are already more than half-way through this semester. This also means we are also half-way through our studies of psychology this semester. Throughout the week, the amazing Sir Wafiy taught us more about intelligence. This part is so interesting because we got to discover more about intelligence. Now we got the change to know why some of our roommates basically eat, sleep, and play and then get high marks. Isn't it frustrating to see them study less but then got higher marks. But woe no more, our lesson this week taught us a hell of a lot of our thinking, intelligence and cognition.

Thinking, Cognition, Intelligence

people sometimes say, we aren't thinking properly, or we aren't thinking at all. But what does that mean really? To start off, thinking is a mental activity that goes on in the brain when a person is organizing, understanding and communicating information. So, when we are listening to instructions, solving maths problems or explaining them, we are in fact, thinking! Have you ever heard the word Cognition? Well, it's kind of like the same meaning as thinking.

Ever thought of how we think? Come on, there must be that one moment that we suddenly pondered about how do we do those magical, fantastical, out of this world task...Thinking. Let me ask you this, ever had some kind of picture in your head, some sort of image that keeps coming in your head? Maybe that girl you saw across the street the other day. Hah...Gotcha. Well, the images of pictures you see are really called mental images. Mental Images is mental representations that stand for objects or events and have a picture-like quality. So if you are thinking about an ice cream, maybe you would have this image in your head. Yum-yum....

But then, are we just seeing images in our brains? But what if we are thinking about a hexagon, or the famous equation "Energy equals to mass time the square of speed of light". Do we see images? I don't think so. This is what our lecturer calls Concepts. He said that Concept is ideas that represents a class or category of object, events and activities.

This is how our minds think using concepts

Concepts are further broken down to other subdivisions. Firstly, we have Subordinate concept. It is the most specific of all the other concepts. An example of a subordinate concept is Spongebob's house.

We all know this is Spongebob's house

Next we have Formal concept. A formal concept is like the shape of a circle. The concept is defined by specific rules or features.

A circle does not have any edges

Apart from that, there is also a term Natural concept. It is a concept that people form as a result of experience in the real world. An example is the platypus. We consider it a mammal although it has bird-like features.

A Prototype, on the other hand is a concept that closely matches the defining characteristics of a concept. For example, for the typical European, an apple would be the strongest prototype of a fruit because has striking color and it is sweet. For tropical countries, a coconut would be the strogest prototype of a fruit.

Problem Solving

Okay. we have a rough idea on how our mind works, now let's see what are the methods our brain uses when we want to solve a problem. The brain uses three methods:

Trial And Error (Mechanical)
Trying one solution after another until one works

Algorithms
This is like a building manual. It has a step-by-step procedure to achieve the objective. It is very specific and the answer is specific and always correct. If you did not mess up that is. Haha..

Heuristic
It is basically an educated guess. It is sometimes known as rule of thumb.

Insight
It is a sudden perception to a solution of a problem

But then, there are some problems when we think or try to solve something. This is because there are barriers to problem solving. They are:

1. Functional Fixedness: This happens when we think about an object's function only
2. Mental Set: This is happens when we persist in using the same "old-fashioned" way because it worked before
3. Confirmation Bias: This happens when people favor evidences that are in conform with thier beliefs

Intelligence

Next, we also learned about intelligence. It is the ability to learn from one's experiences, aquire knowledge and use resources effectively. It can be tested by IQ tests. IQ test measures IQ. IQ is a number we get when we divide a persons mental age by his or her chronological age. It is first used by German psychologist William Stern. There are three main types of IQ test:

1. Binet's Mental Ability Test
2. Stanford-Binet Test
3. Wechsler Test

Sample IQ Test

Creativity

But then, what about creativity? People say that it is different from intelligence. Truth is, creativity the ability to combine ideas or behavior in new ways.

In creativity, there is Convergent thinking and Divergent thinking. Convergent thinking is like when we think of how to solve an equation. We used what we have learnt to get to a definite answer. Divergent thinking is like thinking out of the box. We are using our imagination and are not limited to reality.

Intelligence Theories

Now we look at some theories of intelligence that psychologists proposed

Spearman's Theory
He proposed that intelligence is two different abilities. G Factor is general factor, which is like the ability to solve problems and have reasoning. S Factor is specific factor, which are specific abilities like playing a guitar.

Gardener's Multiple Intelligence

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
This theory was proposed by Robert J Sternberg. He said that intelligence can be divided into three divisions

Emotional Intelligence
Then there is also a theory about our intelligence about emotions