Social Psychology is the study of human’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in relation to other humans and their surroundings. That is a lot of information and can be quite complex and overwhelming. Therefore, this paper breaks down the components of social psychology have into five categories; discovering the self, influencing others: persuasion, influencing others: obedience and conformity, and group dynamics. In addition, each category will be broken down, making the information easy to understand. These five categories of this paper will summarize social psychology and grant a basic understanding of the science.
Discovering the Self
Beginning with the self. Our self-concept is what humans consciously know about themselves. …show more content…
Anything people may be aware of regarding themselves that others would not be able to know. Public self-awareness is just the contrary, any image people portray and allow the outside world to see (Feenstra, 2013). More specifically, feeling nervous and excited to go on a date but dressing casual and acting natural, respectively.
There are many corners of the self. This paper has succinctly covered four; self-concept, self-schema, private self-awareness, and public self-awareness. Adding to that list is the acting-self. The acting-self is the image people display to others, this is also known as presentation. This presentation is comparable to the private-self versus the public-self. A person’s presentation projects the self-image they want others to see, much like the public-self. This image being projected may not correctly portray the person behind the mask or, so to speak (Feenstra, 2013).
Another way a person can mask themselves is by personally handicapping themselves better known as self-handicapping. Self-handicapping means a person sabotages their success in a way that can be blamed on something else and may not affect their self-image (Feenstra, …show more content…
Self-esteem describes a person’s emotional estimation of self-worth. If a person feels they are very worthy they are said to have a high self-esteem, adversely the opposite is true of a person with low self-esteem. Similarly, self-efficacy deals with a person’s thoughts on their ability to accomplish a specific task (Feenstra, 2013).
Thinking about Others The human brain makes an effort to explain situations, both internally and externally based on little to no facts. These are called attributions. Internal attributions are assumptions made based on what is inside of the body, conversely, external attributions are made based on anything outside of the body (Feenstra, 2013). Insert Example Here
These attributions consist of three things; internal or external, stable or unstable, and global or specific. These three components are patterns which explain an individual’s explanatory style. There are two explanatory styles; optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic explanatory will explain an event as being internal, stable, and global, or each the opposite. They also blame negative events on outside factors and do not see any event as being permanent. Adversely, a pessimistic explanatory style will blame things on themselves and expect events to be repetitious (Feenstra, 2013). Add Example