User:MandaG/Tutorial and lecture 1

Hi Everyone and welcome to my first weeks thoughts, comments, reflections and just points I find interesting.

First I'm not going to lie I was little excited about the first lecture, not because I'm particularly studious, more that I was curious about what could possibly be taught about what each of us do every single day, act in a social maner. Naturally as all good stories of learning go, I was mistaken and overconfident in my own knowledge and what the course actually was about. My favourite definition of social psychology is the ABC (affect/feeling, behavioural and cognitive)mainly because I imagine it is the one a lot of people can most relate to. I know whenever I have any issues (which is frequently), I go through the process of how I'm feeling what I'm thinking and how I act and wondered whether I am more concious of it because I am a psych student or if it is purely human nature to do so?

When looking into the history of social psychology I was surprised at how early study into this area began. Looking at the kind of experiments done have been of particular interest particularly as some of them would never make it through the ethics committee's these day's. I think my favourite one would be the Stanford prison experiment as I had just watched a documentary on it where some of the participants were interviewed. I find it absolutely facinating that people knowing they were participants in an experiment could be "so deep into another personality" (as they said on the documentary) that they could rationalise their inhumane actions (the guards anyway).

Research Methods
I kind of glazed over during the next part of the lecture on research methods as I feel last semester's stats is enough to tide me over for a lifetime while realising (and dreading) the fact I still have next semester's.

Culture
Once again doubting what could be taught about something I was sure I knew a little about, culture was an area of interest for me. For some reason, and I guess most people are the same, I never thought what is was that reinforced me to act the way I do at particular times. Egotistically I thought I was doing because I wanted to or felt like it. However while going through the notes I see the idea of the selfish impulse of doing what I want being moderated by my social conscience to do what is best for society is not so radical. James tells us that people get most of what we need from other people and that culture is our general store of information, that we look to each other first. While in the lecture I thought about this and decided to monitor myself over the next few days and sure enough when I needed help I went to the parents, siblings, lecturers pretty much my social circle first, and when asked to do something I didn't want to do I caught myself thinking about it in terms of the society eg: Mum says- Do the dishwasher! At this point I am desperately trying to enjoy the lull before the assessment starts by catching up with my old friend the TV, and I just don't want to. My thought process involved a risk assessment involving whether it would be worth it for the rest of the family if I simply ignored Mum's request and made her really mad. Trust me that would not be good for the rest of the family! I therefore do the dishwasher and employ my social concience in a trivial yet everyday manner.