s.psy journals

FNBE 04/13 PHUA JING SERN PSYC0103

Social Psychology – Journal 1

For the topic ‘Self-Concept’, we were first told to write out what makes us special as an

individual. So we wrote 5 unique but simple statements in a short sentence starting “I AM”. I

thought long and hard on what traits reflects who I am and what makes me, me. But during

the process, I found out that I’ve been changing my personalities from time to time. For

example, I was a quiet boy during around the age of 13, having little social interaction due to

having an introvert personality. But as time passes and started mixing with different group of

students, I then became more open-minded and extrovert. I became more initiative and

started developing leadership traits, of course with the help of my friends. Besides that also

started developing bizarre and unique traits as well, which till now I am still proud off that

makes me who I am. After all the thinking, we then gather together in a circle and share our

personality traits with one another. Surprisingly, many of my friends have unusual traits, plus

some common ones that we share too. After that, our lecturer told us to close our eyes and

think about our past experiences, our love life, our actions etc. and honestly, my heart did

sunk a little. But all and all, this lesson actually made me look back on who I was, and I

believe that friends are probably the biggest influences that help shape someone’s personality

in the future. I must admit that I have great friends that help me rise up to be a better man, a

man that is more extrovert and ready for the outside world.



Now this lesson is an interesting one. We all see this kind of person in schools and in public.

Announcing his or her great achievements in a team effort, but gave none to his or her

members. This is what we call “Self-Serving Bias”. Generally, this personality trait is mostly

labeled as one of the bad traits of being a person, but at certain scenario it is consider as a

necessity. For example, if an individual great leader is too humble and gave all of his effort to

his or her members, that individual might suffer some case of bullying, spoiling his or her

team on thinking that their leader will provide all the work while they themselves can relax,

on the same time taking all the credits. As in contrast, a self-serving bias leader will result

losing the trusts of his or her members. So in every way there will be pros and cons, it is just

the matter of fact of balancing the welcoming praise that we should deserve. This lesson

really is an eye opener, it does reflect on who I am where at times I do take more credit than I

should have deserve, and vice versa. But this lesson, our lecturer took let us experiences

scenarios, the good and the bad. But as mentioned earlier, it’s all about balancing one

another. After all, we do deserve the spotlight once for a while without being a bossy leader.



I find this week’s class pretty fun and interactive, it’s about how vision and our thinking

works. Though it may sound obvious, where we usually think what we see, but at times, what

we see might deceive us. We started off with a brief introduction of our eye, like a typical

biology class back in secondary school. And later on, interestingly we learnt that how color

alone can change a person’s perspective. For example, a woman in red tends to be more

attractive to men than any other colors. Other than that, we were also had an interactive

session about reversible figures, a single picture that contains 2 or maybe more meaning

through different perspectives. One of the famous arts done is the vase and the 2 silhouette,

which is also being displayed in Ripley’s museum. Furthermore, there’s almost intentional

blindness, which also mean openly blinded to a certain illusion. Later on our lecturer than

gave us more illusions that blew our mind, like the famous depth and distance perception,

context effect, the Necker cube etc. All and all it was really a fun class; it made me scratch

my head in confusion, and realized that it also reflects in our modern world. Not being

superstition or whatsoever, but music videos nowadays are getting weirder and weirder, and

through rumors, it was popularly said that it brings dark messages to the masses (the

illuminati propaganda). So all I can say is that, be careful as there are things that is more than

meets the eye.



Now this is something interesting, an open topic ‘Attraction and Close Relationships’ that

relates the causes of close, love and ending intimate relationships. Proximity, Familiarity and

Similarity are the main factors that increase liking a liking from an individual towards

another, which I can say that I fully agree. And a small scenario was made by the lecturer

where she gave us an old schematic diagram of a Westgate West Building with rooms labeled

with different numbers. Later a conclusion was made where different positions of rooms can

affect the relations between roommates, but the rapid development of technology connections

is starting to change our course of relationship communications, as our lecturer mentioned.

Futhermore, our lecturer also explained that our personalities go through stages of of life as

we grow old, as explained in Erikson’s stage theory. And under the Social Exchange of

relatioships, there’s a theory where the cost-reward ratio has to be maintained a balance for a

relationship to be reinforced, including their partner, friends and family. Spearking of family,

young ones do have early emotional development, where an experiment was made called

Harlow experiment, which includes a separation anxiety scenario of a baby monkey and its

mother. And lastly, Fehr (1994) brought out a theory where there are two main kinds of close

relationships which are Passionate Love and Companionate Love; and another theory by

Sternberg’s (1988) Triangle of Love, which includes the different combination of Intimacy,

Passion and Commitment in a close relationship.



For this week’s lesson, our lecturer brought out the topic of ‘Conformity and Group

Behavior’ which relates about the respond of attitude of an individual and its surrounding

culture. A little experiment was made in the class where the student worked together to

somewhat bluff a un-notify student was influenced by the general false answer, the

experiment worked eventually as the un-notify student was influenced by the general false

answer made by his classmate. A social scenario where an individual has a tendency to fit

into the public is called ‘Conformity’ which can be classified into physical presence and

group pressure. For example, the ‘Stanley Milgram(1960s) – Controversial landmark

experiment’ and the ‘Zimbardo’s Prison experiment ( 1970s)’. And the Bystander effect

experiment is what interested me which I like to use in my psychology assignment in the

coming weeks. An experiment video was shown regarding a man kidnapping a girl in public,

which it’s quite sad to see the poor respond in general. I summary, I believed that human

minds are easily influenced, humane or not.

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Education