Social psychology

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.