TANG YING JIEN0322357

Session MONDAY (10am-12pm)Course SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY [PSYC0103]

Lecturer T. SHANKARSubmission Date 16 NOVEMBER 2015

Journal 1 (14 of September 2015)

Social Facilitation

Social Facilitation is a term used as a theory that helps us understand why we are motivated to

do certain tasks done together as a team comparing to individual task. It is a tendency for people who

are being watched or observed to perform better than they would alone on simple task. This theory

suggests that the mere or imagined presence of people in social situations creates an atmosphere of

evaluation. The social facilitation theory was brought up by Norman Triplett when he began to study

competitive nature in 1898. In his experiment, his outcome was two types of social facilitation, which is

the co-action effect and the audience effect. Co-action effect means a phenomenon whereby increased

task performance comes about by the mere presence of others doing the same task while the audience

effect means the presence of passive spectator will increase the efficiency of a person’s work.

Social facilitation are mostly seen in team based task. Take example of a football match, a

football player will perform better when he is team up with his team members rather than playing on his

own. This is seen when the player was motivated to perform better when he knows that the outcome of

the match is affected by his performance. The football player does his practice together with his

member to make him feel more comfortable to perform when he is in a match with his own teammates.

Also, when the football player is place under a stadium filled with cheering spectators, this will increase

the social facilitation effect under co-action effect. This will boost the player’s morality and his

performance is heavily enhance as he knows that people are supporting him. This come under

evaluation of audience as he do not want to lose his reputation and thus perform better in front of a

crowd.

Norman Triplett was also experimenting on children to prove the social facilitation theory. There

were two conditions, the child alone and children in pairs but working alone. Their task was to wind in a

given amount of fishing line and Triplett reports that many children worked faster in the presence of a

partner doing the same task. This proves that social facilitation theory affects how the children’s

efficiency and group work does works better than individual.

As how I experience social facilitation, it occurs to me during one of the ENBE project, which is

building a city. As first, I was paired up with Darren Tan, Hui Teng and Koon Qi. I got hyped up when my

teammates was very enthusiastic and motivated to do their best on this project. This is when social

facilitation kicks in. I was motivated to perform better when I know my performance will affect the

outcome of our project grades. I could also see that my teammates shows strong social facilitation. With

a motivating and optimistic members we are able to come up with a superb idea for our city. Each

member of the group was given a task to complete it. So, although our task was different, we stimulate

each other and prompts ourselves to focus on our own specific job. Giving our morality a big boost and

our adrenaline keep on pumping even when we were working late midnight. For example, one of our

overnight meeting, Darren Tan was very tired, but because the other members are full of enthusiasm

and Darren Tan was aware of peer evaluation and do not want to let his own teammates down, he

started to focus and pour in as much energy as possible to get the work done. After days of hard work,

we were able to come up with a beautiful city and got a solid A- for it which is a well done job. We could

not have possibility done it without the help of encouragement and support which shows strong social

facilitation.

When I was doing my ITD orthographic drawings, which is an individual work, I show great social

facilitation. I was assign to create an actual scale of a model car to complete my project. As I prefer to do

my work with my peers, this indirectly prompt myself to work harder. Observing my friends doing this

project, I was encourage to do it too, so that I can keep up the work flow. I was trying to compete

against my friends so I can able to get better results too. Also, I let my lecturers to review my progress as

when working under the supervision of my lecturers, I self-encourage myself to work better to able to

do to the expectation of my lecturers wanted and not letting them down. This falls under the category of

co-action effect of social psychology and I was able to complete my project with the help of this social

facilitation.

In a nutshell, social facilitation is an optimistic psychology effect that affects greatly on support,

motivation, and efficiency when used on the right thing. People should imply this effect on their daily

work so they feel more motivated to complete their job and it will contribute a lot to the ever-changing

world.

Finishing my ENBE project with Darren, Hui Teng and Koon Qi

Journal 2 (16 of September 2015)

Social Comparison

Social Comparison is an effect that occurs in most of our daily life to strive for the best by

competing against other people. The social comparison process involves people whom evaluates

themselves of their own attitudes, abilities and beliefs in comparison of others. In most cases, we try

and compare ourselves to those among our peers and with whom we are similar. Most of us have this

social skills and impulse control to keep our envy and social comparisons quiet but our true feelings may

come out in subtle ways. In this social comparison skills, it is break down to two kinds of social

comparison, which is the upward social comparison and the downward comparison. Upward social

comparison is when we compare ourselves with those who we believe are better than us while the

Downward social comparison is when we compare themselves to others who are worse off than

ourselves. This theory was first presented by psychologist, Leon Festinger in 1954. He believed that we

engage in this comparison process as a way of establishing a benchmark by which we can make accurate

evaluations of ourselves.

In most competition, social comparison can be identified in this kind of events. For example, a

marathon runner may know that he or she can run a mile in under six minutes. To the runner, it is

consider a huge feat and a good achievement. However, the runner cannot know if this is a really good

time until he or she compares it with other people’s time. If the runner’s time is better than other’s

people time, downward social comparison occurs and this may influence the runner to not improves as

he or she thinks that they are the best and no more further practice can be done to surpass anyone. This

type of comparison generally makes one feel better about themselves. This is rather not consider a good

practice as humans are born to compete, survive and be at the top. He or she should rather continue to

aim better. And by doing so, this will makes the runner to be the best while preventing other people

from surpassing him. But if his or her time is longer than the compared time, upward social comparison

take place. This is where competition happens and the runner will try and compete himself or herself to

be better. The runner will continue to train themselves until they reach their expectation and beat the

other people’s time.

In my case, social comparison was a familiar to me in secondary school. When I started to gain

more knowledge and was aware that there are bound to have people that is better than me, I starts to

work harder. Take example of school’s exam and test, among my peers and myself, we will compare our

result with each other to know who is better. Mostly, if I know my friends did better than me for this

test, I tends to pour more time and do more exercise on that particular subject. Of course there will be

people who did worse than me in that test. I will feel better about my results and “feed” my self-esteem.

I know this is not a good practice but this human nature are mostly unavoidable and I will constantly

remind myself that I should do better than then people who are better than me. There is also another

side effect of this process. If I get better grades than others, I have a relatively positive self-evaluations

while worse grades will makes me feel to be less competent in that particular test, which leads to

negative self-evaluation.

For instance, one time I was in a speech competition during my primary school period, I only got

the consolation prize among my peers as there it was a strong competition happened between each

participants. This makes me felt that I was not good in that particular field of talent. This happens to

increase my low academic self-concept in that talent of speech. But in the other hand, this greatly

contributed to my perception towards upward comparisons. It encourages me to train harder as it

boosts my self-concepts when I believe that I can improve my own performance and become as good as

my comparison target. This social comparison process not only influence my self-concepts but also

improve my own performance too. Since the speech competition, I learn that we need to be constantly

compete to be better, not just compete against other people, but also ourselves too. This have a great

influence from the self-concept theory and it helps me to promote my social comparison’s skills.

To see in in different perception, social comparison can bring negative and also positive effects

to our daily lives. We should be optimistic in competing against other people will good sportsmanship,

while avoiding envy and jealousy. This will make us more proud of who we are and thus do better in

society.

Journal 3 (5 of October 2015)

Stereotyping

Stereotyping, one of the world’s questionable psychology effect that prevents the world from

uniting each other. Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular

group. They are classified into different groups of the same characteristics. These classification can be

either positive, negative or neutral, such as when various nationalities are stereotyped as friendly or

The trophy I got when I entered the speech competition :D

unfriendly. Stereotyping effect have both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of

stereotyping is that it allows us to quickly respond to events as we have the similar experience before.

While in the down side, it makes us ignore the differences between individuals, therefore we think

things about people that might not be true. Although stereotyping probably tends to convey in a

negative impression, this psychology process is vital to social skills as it allow people to rapidly process

new information about an incident or person, organize people’s past experiences, help people to

meaningfully assess differences between individual and groups and also help people to make predictions

about other people’s behavior. As stated by Stephanie Madon, a professor of psychology, she said that

“It’s a part of human nature to categorize”. In fact, it’s an essential component to learn from experience.

Stereotyping is basically trying to categorize so that you are able to recognize something quickly.

This is why people in the latter year stereotypes people with darker skins are in a lower social hierarchy.

Back to the old age, white people captured black people are treat them as slaves and thus makes the

black people violent to stand on their own ground. So in present days, we subconsciously label the black

people will names like Africans, Nigger, people who is violent and does bad things, and so on. This is

done because in most of our minds, we stereotype black people is dangerous and should be avoided to

prevent ourselves from being rob or other bad things. Stereotype doesn’t includes racial only, it also

goes way beyond gender. Take example, people in the society stereotyped that man are more smarter

and are more capability to do work while woman are more fragile and should stay home as work as a

housewife. This will make each gender having different perception towards each other which results in

negative social term, feminism and sexism.

Back in my secondary school, I had a friend who have darker skin color. I know that my friend is

a Chinese born family but because of genetic, he inherit this skin color. The problem starts here when

people starts to make fun of him as a black man or “nigga” although he is a Chinese. Some of them

called him as a drug addict because people stereotype that drug addict tends to be black peoples. It was

also a problem for him to find his own friends as people despite him. He himself also know the fact that

he have darker skin tone, and it was a good thing that he is mature enough to understand and play along

with his peers. But for I was not taught that darker skin people are bad when I was small, so I get along

with him easily. What I was saying here is that stereotyping are usually created by your own thoughts,

you can choose to ignore the stereotyped fact.

To be honest, sometimes I also stereotyping other group of people. I used to stereotype one of

my friend as stupid and doesn’t know how to socialize. He is a special case as he is rather Down

syndrome guy. He doesn’t speak much and when he does, he usually stutter and opens his mouth with

all his saliva dripping out. He slouch and always creeps and stalks on people. I don’t like to hang out with

him because I perceive him as retarded and don’t feel like hanging out with him as I don’t want other

people to categorize me as him. But everything change when I know that he is actually very intellectual

and very good in science and math. I didn’t realize that he is only weak in socializing and he is a very

normal person just like you and me. I kind of hated myself for stereotyping people since then.

There is also one time, I was walking home at night and there is some foreigner workers walking

pass by me, I was scared of being robbed by them as I stereotyped foreigner people as bad people and

does disgraceful act. So I walk a few distance away from them and walk quicker. When I got home, I told

my mother about the incident. But my mother corrected me that not all foreigner workers are bad and

to be real, they are actually friendly and kind just like other human being. Sadly, the bad people that

truly exist are people with real intention of doing evil deeds. She told me that I need to differentiate

different race of people and bad people. She said that even Chinese or Indian people can be bad too.

After that, my stereotyping on foreigner workers have decrease and sometimes, I show them my respect

too.

To sum it up, stereotype is a human nature of helping the brain from processing stuffs too much.

But humans fall into the trap to label stereotyping as a negative psychology term. It is not the

psychology term which is despising other particular group or class of people, but rather it is what

society’s mind concept towards

the things they despise.

Journal 4 (19 of October 2015)

Confirmation Bias

Ever thought that what you know are always right? Trying to stand on your ground? That is what

a confirmation bias means. In short, confirmation bias refers to the tendency to select the fact you

learnt and consider the information as true that confirms to your beliefs. Breaking it down, confirmation

My rather dark skin friend, Cuin Yang (photo taken after a prefect ceremony)

True Beauty and Friendship is found in the inside, not the Outside, my friend, Chan Dickson

bias means that you learn and observe through all the result of years of experience and objective

analysis of the information you have got in hand. Then, you stick to that particular info you know about

and try to find other sources to support your own belief. Moreover, you will only take in supporting facts

that aids the existing known information you got, while ignoring other facts that oppose your beliefs

towards the information you know and also interprets it as fake or not true enough. As a normal people

with common human nature, we will push the data that does not support our information and accept

data that supports it.

For instance, a common example that explains confirmation bias is that people learning stuffs

and news on the internet. Nowadays, society are dependable on the internet and social media to know

what is going on outside the world rather than reading a newspaper or watching television which have

information that are verified and confirmed. So, people who saw any news on the internet will be

amazed and try to find out more on other website to support the information they get on the internet.

And when they read on other website saying that the news is actually fake, they will feel confused and

ignore the fact that it was fake and try to search on other places until they found other matching data,

so that they can brag with other people with their findings. For example, Andy likes to drinks Coca-Cola

every time and his friends advise him not to drink that much. Then one day, he found on the internet

saying that Coca-Cola is indeed bad for health. He then felt puzzle by the info and tried to search

information that supports his beliefs. He then proudly tells his friends that Coca-Cola was not that bad at

all when he grab on onto a sole information that says Coca-Cola contains good nutrients for the body

which is only one website that had wrote it.

Sometimes in life, you just have to stand on your own ground just to prove your not-100%-

correct information are true and legit. When I was young, I use to think Doraemon was something real

and it is just a very expensive robot that I don’t see every day because no one I know can afford it. I

learn that Doraemon was true when my parents said that one day they will buy me a Doraemon when I

am a good boy. I even bragged in front of my kindergarten friends that one day I will own a Doraemon.

And the results was terrible as my friends laugh at my stupidness and told me that Doraemon is just a

character in a comic book and it is not even real. I was very mad and puzzle at the same time that I hid

my friend’s eraser (I was very young that time, so yeah, I did stupid and childish things). I quickly went

home that day and ask my parents if Doraemon was real, they said it was just a comic character too, I

was really confused at that point. My parents then showed me the comic author and all other evidence

that Doraemon was just a fictional character. They say that Doraemon was real because I was very

young at that time and wanted me to be good, so they lie to me that Doraemon was real. I was really

sad but learn the truth the hard way.

Once, I had a very close friend who doesn’t believe in god or other heavenly stuffs. But during a

period, she was having a great depression and stress and could not coped with it. Then, she started to

believe in Christianity as she was exposed to her another friend that said God can help her. She began to

feel that God was all by her side and assisting her life since she started join Christianity. She means a lot

to me and considered a rather intimate good friend to me and I don’t want her to start to wander off. As

an atheist I know it is a very jealous thing to do, but I didn’t force her to leave Christianity and I just

advised her that God is just a way of making people to have something to hang on. Because to me, god

is actually myself, and everyone is God to themselves. People believe in God, because sometimes they

don’t believe in themselves, so they take God as a substitute. I know it is very offensive to religious

people, but I see religion as a confirmation bias process where people just believe in their own religious

beliefs. It is just up to our own selves to either believe it or not.

Well to be honest, confirmation bias always exist as long as human beings debate over a

statement. There is always no right and wrong and everything is perceived by your own. Just learn and

accept what you think it is good and not evil stuffs, then it will be alright.

At least I got Him, which is good :')

Journal 5 (2 of November 2015)

Observational Learning

Discovered by famous Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura, Observational Learning is a

psychological process that take place at any point in a person’s life, it tends to be the most common

process done during childhood as children as young as an infant starts to learn from older figures and

peers in their live. There is four stages of observational learning which is the attention, retention,

production and motivation. In this four step pattern; the Attention, which is the individual notices

something in the environment; and Retention, the individual remembers what was noticed. Followed by

Reproduction, the individual produces an action that is copy of what was noticed; and lastly motivation

which is the environment delivers a consequence that changes the probability of the behavior will be

emitted again. Bandura’s founding says that people learn through their life. They observe and imitates

The girl I cherish, Lim Shu Li, please be fine for me, remember who you are ♥

the things they see. The process is also influential by the outcome of the action being made. There is

three possible which is positive, negative and neutral outcomes that changes the observational learning

of oneself.

Observational learning also plays an important role in the socialization process as children learn how to

behave and respond to each other by observing how their parents and other outsiders interact with

each other. For instance, if a child saw a boy was being scolded by a teacher when the boy bullying other

children. The child then take note on the negative outcome of what will happened if he also bully other

children. The child learns that he should not hit others as the child knows that he or she will get scold if

he or she do that. Besides that, observational learning is vital for children to learn how to suit

themselves in the society. Not all human is able to cope with the different environment that they are

place in. They need to learn and imitate to be able to join in the new environment. So, children learn

from their parents, peers or other strangers to strengthen their knowledge on how to assimilate

themselves in the society.

Observational learning also brought up an important question which is if a children is able to imitate

what they observe, will they imitate violence they observe in popular films and televisions? In my

perception, observational learning is based on the child’s maturity and how the people beside them that

influence them. It is possible that they may imitate the violence, but if taught in a good manner, they

will learn that it is very bad to imitate it and will bring great consequences. So, that is why parental

teaching is very important to create a positive observational learning.

When I was young, my sister is a very tidy person. She used to clean up her table and arrange her beds.

She usually cannot stand that the fact that there is dust on the area she is at. This bring me attention

when I notice as a child, that if my sister is able to keep the house clean, she will be rewarded with

sweets and other good presents. I observe and learn to start cleaning up my mess too in hope for a well

done reward.

There were also once happened in my life during my secondary school. My class didn’t have any teacher

in charge as the teachers are away for an important meeting, leaving students to self-study. Me and my

friends was bored and wanted to do something and one of my friend bring in some matches that he

took from the science lab when we were having biology classes. My friends started burning stuffs and

was having a good time. In my head, I was thinking, why not join them and have fun? Nothing will

possibly go wrong right? In order to “obtain” that joy, I stupidly joined them and burned different kinds

of stuff. Disaster struck when our math teacher walk into our class to replace the current teacher, we

quickly cover up all the burnt stuffs and matches. But karma hit us hard and our teacher smelled

something was burning and some smoke odor came from our area. Our teacher then yelled at us and

asked us to surrender as she will punish everyone if we did not admit it. We were then heavily punished

by the disciplinary teacher and points deducted from our attitude scores. This negative outcome of the

observational learning on doing bad stuffs really impact on my life. I started to be attentive on things

that should be followed while thing that I should avoid it.

In short, observational learning takes place in any stages of our lives, it may even happen when you are

old and frail. The important thing to take note is that behavior and action taken can change through

observation on other individuals or peers. Choose wisely and walk a peaceful life.

Old times with my "Bruhs"! YOLO XD