Name : Lee Yaue Shen

ID : 0315381

Course : FNBE April Intake

Social Psychology Journal

18.12.2013

Social Psychology 4

For this week, I had learned about the attitudes and social judgements. I figured out this

topic was quite complicated and confusing. Therefore, I spent lot of time to investigate

about this topic. This topic discussed about the changing of attitudes and behaviours in

various ways. Attitudes can be divided into 3 components, which are cognitive

component, affective component and behavioural component. Source, message and

receiver are the factors in changing attitudes and behaviours. I also learned operant

conditioning and observational behaviour from this topic. Operant conditioning is a form

of learning in which responses come to be influenced by their consequence.

Observational learning is a process of an organism’s responding is learned through the

observation of others. Besides that, primary reinforcers and secondary reinforcers were

also learned in the class. Primary reinforcers are biological needs. Food, drink and

pleasure are the common examples primary reinforces. Secondary reinforces are more

focusing on conditioned reinforcement. For example is token, grade in school and

money. Other than that, I learned the differences between positive reinforcement and

negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is a reinforcement that can push someone

to do something that provides them advantages. For example, if a child gets good grades

in his or her examination, parents will give them reward in order to encourage them to

keep up their good results. However, negative reinforcement is the opposite of positive

reinforcement. Clean house to get rid of mess is one of example of negative

reinforcement. Lastly, I also learned that cognitive dissonance exists when related

cognitions are inconsistent when they contradict each another.

Social Psychology 5

This time, Miss Chia had taught us conformity and group behaviour. First was

conformity, conformity was the act of beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that will be changed by

social pressure which means people will change their decision based on situation. From what I

know is people will follow what majority do although they have strong determination on their

decision. This is why people cannot follow their own way to do their stuff because of not

believing themselves. Besides, there is another way of conformity which is people will follow

what their boss call them to do without thinking the pros and cons. There are no dissenters

between them, they are the followers. Furthermore, an experiment which was called Stanford

Prison Experiment was taken to test the conformity of prisoners. The experiment had proved the

impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social

and institutional support. It also illustrates cognitive dissonance theory and the power of

authority. I learned that group behaviour is a behaviour that many people had brought up. It does

make sense to me. Group behaviour contains bystander effect which is the effect when people

will less likely to help when they are in group than when alone. It is a very common

phenomenon in today’s world. As an example, people will not help a person who is having

difficulties when they are a lot of people, they think about they do not have the responsibilities to

help such person. However, there is benefit of group behaviour such as a team of people will

outperform a work than do it alone. In group work, the progress will be faster and more efficient.

There are lot of ways to figure out conformity and group behaviour, both of them have their own

advantages and disadvantages to this community.