Sample content Social Psychology: Bringing it all Together PSY 301 I guess the easiest thing that we have learned since we arrive in this world is interacting with other people. As we grow and develop, we get to see and interact with different types of people and we try to understand them through social psychology. We understand why people act the way they do and why some judge others and social psychology made us understand why we tend to decide with others and g with their judgment rather than have our own minds about the matter. Social psychology introduces as to our self and to our group or the people we belong with. We tend to try to understand our self and how we are as a person then we try to act and behave accordingly as to whom we are and this concept is called self-concept. This is our idea of which we are our understanding of our self (Mcleod, 2008). This composes of our belief about our self, our attitude and behavior and our opinion as how we are supposed to behave

1. PSY 301 Week 5 Final PAPER Social Psychology Bringing It All Together
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Sample content
Social Psychology: Bringing it all Together
PSY 301

2. I guess the easiest thing that we have learned since we arrive in this world is
interacting with other people. As we grow and develop, we get to see and interact
with different types of people and we try to understand them through social
psychology. We understand why people act the way they do and why some judge
others and social psychology made us understand why we tend to decide with
others and g with their judgment rather than have our own minds about the matter.
Social psychology introduces as to our self and to our group or the people we
belong with.
We tend to try to understand our self and how we are as a person then we try to
act and behave accordingly as to whom we are and this concept is called self-
concept. This is our idea of which we are our understanding of our self (Mcleod,
2008). This composes of our belief about our self, our attitude and behavior and
our opinion as how we are supposed to behave and how we really behave
(Feenstra, 2011). As for me, my self-concept is that I am a worrier and I said this
because I always end up telling other people about my worries so I share it with
them. This is very different with my friend who always keeps her taught to herself
and stays aloof all the time. Then aside from our self-concept, we also have what
we call our self-schema. Self-schema is the way we look at ourselves hence it can
be associated with what we liked to do. My self-schema is that I am a gardener
because I love working on my garden. Every time I see something about
gardening, I can easily associate myself with it because of my self-schema hence
my behavior shows how I perceive myself. Self-schema is the same as self-
awareness hence I am aware of myself either publicly or privately. Private self-
awareness are things that we know about our self while the public self-schema is
the way we behave around other people because we want them to see us that
way. Hence private self-schema is being real with our self like our real feelings and
emotions while the public schema takes care of our public image.
For the public awareness that we have, we try our best to dress, talk and behave
as best as we can because it is how we want to be seen by other people. For
example, we talk as if we knew a lot of things and we do this to impress because
we do know that we don’t know that much. Our public schema wants us to show
that we are smart although we knew that we are not that smart actually. If we think
like this, then it will show our self-efficacy and self-esteem and how we think we are
or the value of our self in our own world. This is link with our personal value of our
own achievements and things that we are proud of (David Sheslow PhD, 2008).
Happy people have higher self-esteem because they know they are happy and a
happy person can do pretty much anything they want. If you are lonely or angry on
the other hand, your self-esteem is low and you don’t feel like socializing with
anyone else because of your low self-esteem. This only shows that most of the
motivated and driven people are the happy ones because they have higher self-
esteem. Self-esteem and self-efficacy play an important role with our behavior and
how we act and meet our goals. A high self-esteem means success and being

3. more productive (Cherry, 2007). If we know our strength, let us focus on that and
make sure we do our best to complete our tasks with our strength. We can gain
more experience by focusing on things that needs our strength and by doing so, we
can become expert on it. The longer we are doing it, the better we become and the
higher our self-esteem would be where as when we do things differently because
we are weak on that aspect, we always end up wondering if we are doing right and
end up with low self-esteem and self-efficacy. This can mean failure for us then.
Trying to understand other people’s behavior and why they are doing it or acting
like it, we are making attributions. We try to make explanations of our behaviors
and other people’s behaviors through attributing it to something (Feenstra, 2011).
There are two kinds of attributions, the internal and external one. Internal attribution
is when we make our assumptions based on what we see say we saw someone
close the door while getting inside a store without knowing that someone is
following him. This is internal attribution because he doesn’t know that someone is
following him yet we assume he is rude and a jerk. This kind of attribution is
considered as incompetent and can be a caused of fundamental attribution error
because we are assuming when in fact there are other factors that could have
caused the man to close the door like for example he doesn’t know that someone
is following him (Feenstra, 2011). It only means that before we throw our opinions
away, let us listen to reasons first and give benefit of the doubt. So why are not
supposed to be making attributions? It is because people’s reaction sometimes
depends on the situation. There are people who react differently from what they
feel because they don’t want other people to see their real feelings and emotion.
This is what we call a planned behavior hence planned behavior can be predicted
based on three things- the attitude towards the behavior, the norms of the subject
towards the behavior and lastly the possible behavior as perceived based on the
person’s personality (Feenstra, 2011). Subject norm is the attitude that we have in
the society, what is deemed to be a normal reaction. One subject norm that we
normally see in this society concerns our teenagers partying wild as a way of
relieving stress. For some, this is not the right way to release stress hence it
became a social norm. Personally, enjoying partying but preferring to stay at home
and feel the quietness around can be another type of social norm. You might know
someone who feels like this hence you have a perceive behavior already in case
you need to predict such behavior. This is considering we have positive outlook of
what the situation is. If in case there is some problems on what happened at an
earlier date and doesn’t want to feel bad about it anymore, then it is called
cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is more like reasoning with yourself to
eventually try to understand why you did such thing like upon going shopping; you
spent more than what you are allowed to hence you are telling yourself those are
important things that you actually need to buy anyway. But not everyone doing
cognitive dissonance is doing it for their benefits because there are people using it
to reasons and defends themselves from their outrageous behaviors before. You

4. might not intend to do it but you might be judging people based on their race hence
you are doing discrimination now.
Racial prejudice has been one of the most common type of prejudices way back in
the 1900’s and today we can still see some families believing that interracial
marriages is wrong in all sense of the word. There are still people snickering when
seeing a black and white couple walking together. Most people oftentimes just get
along with the flow, afraid to antagonize the majority because they might turn
towards us. When we start feeling this way, this is like limiting our self from
knowing more and having more friends around us.
Fearing the u
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