here is an article that i wrote in regards to my psychology class.i thought id share it.
Social psychology is the study of how a person's thoughts and behavior are
affected by others. According the Dutch philosopher Spinoza humans are
“social animals”.
Social psychology contains elements of both sociology and psychology. People
pPerception and their social awareness vary from one individual to another and are
defined by their social interaction. Our attitude toward others is most of the time
biased and based on social prejudice. This makes us either conform to social norms
and set of values or stand out and be outcast. However we are all subject to tacit
agreements which we will review in this paper.
We perceive people everyday as we go on our daily routines. Little do we
about them but we have already forged subconsciously an image to these
individuals.
What impressions do we have of them? We unconsciously judge people constantly
and this determines the way we interact with them in the first place is a process
called person perception. Our brain consistently collects information from others
(looks, dress, and behavior in the circumstance).
That dictate how we react to others people. This is a major premise when it comes to
How we perceive others alongside with our own sets of beliefs and assumptions.
Therefore it is only right to say that we categories people based on their
outer looks. For instance the Muslim guy with the long beard will assumed to be an
extremist, or the man in a suit a rich man. How we fit people in categories isn’t
always true but we base ourselves on stereotypes and our own implicit theory on
behavior. We judge people because we feel different from ant the attempt to explain
their behavior is called attribution. We all have different attitudes, that is how we
response to social stimulation (objects, people and environement).Their are two
categories of people: First, those who change their attitude in order to fit in a given
social class. The psychologist Salomon Asch named this process conformity. The
tendency to to adopt the common values of social environement. For instance a
college student who unwillingly starts dinking because of peer pressure. Conformity
is the act of complying with the tacit agreement of one‘s rules. Second, those who
stand out as outcasts and are marginalized by society for being different or thinking
differently. Everybody perceives himself to be a certain way, in a positive light most
of the time. We picture ourselves to be helpful, generous, kind, smart. However our
self image is merely a result of society. People are capable of the worst inhuman
atrocities such as torturing and killing when complying with social rules known as
laws. In fact, Stanley Milgram experiences conducted on obedience, revealed that
most people Rather comply blindly to law even tat the expense of human life. There
are inevitably exception, but this means that society conditions us to conform. This
Experience allowed us to understand human mass murder such as the holocaust, or
Genocide of Rwanda.
We are all social animals whose perceptions of others come from our own process of
Attribution is subjective .We tend to explain surrounding people‘s behavior and fit
them in social categories according to our perception of them.
