Social Psychology

Hey fellow people!

Welcome aboard to the Power of Mind.

As you've read earlier, there are so many things around us that are associated with psychology. Amazing isn't it? Now let me bring you to the world of Social Psychology. Now when we think of social, what comes across our mind? Interaction, communication, people, so on and so forth. It is just super AMAZING that in psychology, you could really venture deeper into social. But the question to perceive now is that how social could possibly be related to psychology? Well, in simpler words, psychology defines SOCIAL! It's about understanding the human behaviour in social context.

You might now be wondering what does that really means.

According to Baron, Byrne & Suls (1989) social psychology is “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations”. 

Now to get to know about the human behaviour further, let's move on to SOCIAL COGNITION - attitudes, impression formation, and attribution. 

Attitude

Attitude is defined as the tendency to respond positively or negatively towards ideas, persons, objects or situation. There are simply three components of attitude: affective (emotional), behaviour, and cognitive. All are which important in describing and emphasizing the concept of ATTITUDE. Besides, you might also be wondering how does one form an attitude or in fact how do you tend to have such attitude that you are having now? In an insight, you might think that attitude is somewhat related to your personality, to how you view things, and so on. Yes, true enough but the question now is HOW? Simple enough, there are four main reasonings to how attitude is formed: direct contact with the person, situation, object, or idea; direct instruction from parents or others; interaction with people who hold a certain attitude; watching the actions and reactions of others to ideas, people, objects, and situations. 

Moving on to the next crucial matter, possibly the ones that most of you have been waiting for, IMPRESSION. This is so interesting to learn and to understand because it is what we do in everyday lives, having the first impression of everything that we can sense!

Impression Formation

Impression formation is the forming of the first knowledge that a person has about another person. This might as well be taken as a subjective matter. But you as a person needs to figure out the reason behind having those first impression  thought. So hold your horses! For we will reveal the truth of IMPRESSION... Impression formation is actually a part of social cognition as people make sense out of the world around them. But how do we make initial judgements about certain things? What sorts of information do we use to evaluate? Have these kind of questions came across your mind before? Well if it has or it has never, let us together embark on the journey to find how it really occurs.

Now, some are the questions we might consider when we meet someone are:

• How old is he or she?
• Gender?
• Role?
• Marital status?
• What is its favourite leisure time activity? 
• Is it intelligent?
• Extraverted?
• Friendly?
• Dishonest? 

So on and so forth. Some of these first impressions may come from observations and some may even require further interpretations. Basically, the physical cues of impression formation are physical attractiveness and observation. Nevertheless, there are still barriers when we rely upon impressions: reliance on schemas and heuristics can be problematic, over-reliance on first impression, observer differences, focus on dispositional and not situational cues, and expectancies can influence behaviours.

Attribution

Last but not least, nothing other than ATTRIBUTION! What is an attribution? Basically, attribution is an inference that people make about the causes of events and behaviour. Attribution has now been classified into internal and external as well as stable and unstable. In terms of internal and external it's  a very simple conjecture; internal attribution suggests that an event or a person's behaviour is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities or feelings while external attribution is that an person's behaviour is due to situational factors. 

Example:

Sally gets a poor grade in her recent examinations and if she believes that the cause of the poor results is due to her own fault of procrastinating her work, then it is said that she is making an internal attribution. But if she believes that it is because of the hard and tricky questions being asked in the examination, then it is an external attribution.


Besides, researches have also been able to distinguish between stable and unstable attribution of which when people make a stable attribution, they infer that an event or behaviour is due to unchanging factors whereas unstable attribution is due to temporary factors. 

Example: 

Hana gets a poor grade on his sociology paper and if she attributes her grade because of the reason that she is unwell when she is taking her examinations, then it is said that she is making a stable attribution. But if she attributes the cause of her poor grades by saying that she does not have much time, then it means that she is making an external attribute.