SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND DESIGN FOUNDATION IN

NATURAL BUILD ENVIRONMENT

NAME: THAN LEK MEI

STUDENT ID: 0315538

GROUP/SESSION: MONDAY, 1P.M. - 4P.M.

SUBJECT: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

COURSE: FNBE

LECTURER: MR. T. SHANKAR

SUBMISSION DATE: 12TH MAY 2014

25TH March 2014, 1800

Journal 1

The concept of the false consensus effect and the confirmation bias appealed to me after

learning about it in class. The false consensus effect is an overestimation or overemphasis of how

much other people share our beliefs, opinions, or behaviors. As for confirmation bias, it is the

tendency of people to selectively pay attention or focus on information that supports their belief

or opinions. These two concepts were interesting because there were so many things that it could

relate to in life and in my opinion, these two concepts come hand-in-hand with each other when

it happens.

From my own personal experience, these two concepts played out in interactions with my

friends many times. Personally, I love electronic dance music, also known as EDM, and I love

going to raves. Whenever I went out with my friends, I would bring up EDM as we chatted and

all of us would talk about it happily. As this has happened many times, I thought that my friends

loved EDM as well because we always get excited talking about it. Recently, there was an EDM

event, the Future Music Festival Asia, and I was excited about it and I planned to ask my friends

to go together and have fun. After talking to them about it, I found out that only a few of them

were actually interested in EDM and wanted to go to the festival. I was surprised because the rest

of my friends had talked about it so excitedly with me and I thought that they loved EDM as

well.

The false consensus effect played a part here whereby I thought that all my friends loved

EDM as I loved it and we had talked about it so much before. I was overthinking and thought

that all my friends shared the same interest as me. As for the confirmation bias, I think that some

of my friends may have mentioned that they like EDM but they are not as passionate as I am, and

I only paid attention and focused on the part where they said they like EDM. These two concepts

were interesting and it actually happens to all of us in our everyday lives.

10th April 2014, 1630

Journal 2

Heuristics are mental shortcuts that help us make judgments and solve problems quickly.

The availability heuristic appealed to me as it was used to influence me recently. The availability

heuristic is a mental shortcut that uses any examples that immediately comes to mind to make a

decision.

My family and I were supposed to go to Bangkok for a vacation during the time when the

people in Bangkok were having protests and going through a re-election. This trip to Bangkok

was planned a lot earlier and we did not expect the protests to be so violent. After reading the

news in Bangkok of the bombings and accidents during the protest, my parents decided to

postpone the trip. They had used the availability heuristic on deciding whether to go on the trip

to Bangkok at that point of time. They then used the examples of bombings and cases of people

getting hurt that they have read about as examples to decide on the safety of the trip.

From my side, I protested against their view and told them that it would never happen to

us as we would be tourists and the protests would only involve the locals. Without realizing it, I

was actually using the optimistic bias to fight against my parents’ decision. The optimistic bias is

a bias that makes a person believe that they have a lower risk of experiencing a negative event

compared to others, hence, being optimistic. I tried to reason with my parents that those

bombings and other bad things would happen to other people and not us as we were going there

as tourists for a vacation, and we were not involved in the protests.

19th April 2014, 2000

Journal 3

After learning about the ‘belief in a just world’ theory, I came across a video that

illustrated that theory perfectly. The ‘belief in a just world’ theory is the bias, or belief that good

things happen to good people and vice versa. In my opinion, it is sort of like living in a bubble of

denial that nothing bad will happen to us, as all the bad things would only happen to other

people.

I found a video that used this ‘belief in a just world’ theory perfectly when I was

browsing through Facebook and saw one of my friends sharing it. As I watched the video, this

theory immediately came to my mind as the video showed a very good example of the theory.

The video was part of an effort to raise awareness for the homeless and it consists of interviews

with random people, and these random people were walking along the streets where there were

beggars as they walked, and these beggars were actually their relatives. As they walked down the

street, some of them looked at the beggars and did not even realize that they were their relatives.

This video was interesting and supported the ‘belief in a just world’ theory in my opinion. We

would never have thought that our relatives or anyone we know to be experiencing a bad time

and become beggars. We thought that it would only happen to other people, people we don’t

know.

20th April 2014, 1830

Journal 4:

During the past few months, my friends and I discovered a shocking fact about a close

friend of ours, A. We have known her for a couple of years now and all of us became the best of

friends. It was saddening and disappointing to learn that A had been stealing money from us. We

learned of her stealing act in March this year. It was when all of us went to a bar with a few other

friends. Our friend, A, had gotten a ride from another girl, B, and we met up at the bar. We had a

few drinks and chatted the whole night. Towards the end, B did not have enough money and

went to the ATM to withdraw some money. After that, A and B went to the car and headed to the

exit to pay the parking ticket. B had to go down the car as the machine was quite a distance and

she left her purse in the car. The next morning, B complained to us that there was RM 100 less in

her wallet and after sending A back, B did not go anywhere and headed straight home. All

suspicions headed towards A. All of us then told each other of similar incidents where we lost

money while being with A.

Before confronting A about this issue, all of us discussed on why she would do such a

thing. In fact, all of us were applying the attribution theory, specifically the correspondent

inference theory. We were all discussing on A’s behavior similar to the process of the

correspondent inference theory. We believed that A’s behavior was of her own choice and it was

intentional. Her stealing behavior is low in sociably desirability and that led us to make

dispositional inferences, which is more likely to correspond with her personality. The non-

common effect had bad consequences for us as it affected our friendship and trust. In terms of

situations that other people would face in their lives, I think that all of us would use different

attribution theories to explain about any situation and we unknowingly use the attribution

theories in social psychology.

6th May 2014, 1730

Journal 5:

Recently, I’ve had several friends who went for job interviews and they told me about

their experiences. In regards to their experiences during the job interview, some of them actually

made me thought of the Halo Effect. The Halo Effect is a type of cognitive bias where our

overall impression of a person influences how we feel or think about their character. My friend

actually experienced the Halo Effect, even though he did not know it at that time, when he went

for a job interview. The interviewer had a good impression of my friend and really liked his

personality and attitude. My friend was quite surprised as the interview became more of a casual

conversation towards the end, and they found out that they had similar interests. I think the Halo

Effect played a huge part in this interview because as the interviewer agreed with my friend on

certain things, his impression of my friend have greatly increased positively and would have

thought that my friend had similar qualities as the interviewer himself. It is interesting to see how

people can be swayed from first and overall impressions, or in my friend’s case, leading

themselves to believe that he or she is a good candidate for the job from the overall impression,

without further judgment or analysis.