Reflection Of Social Psychology

As we journey back in time to the first week of our Social Psychology class to date, we smile, with appreciation and the knowledge gained in gearing us towards our future goals. Social psychology allows us to examine our own behavior and the behaviors of others.
For our first chat session we discussed Social Psychology and the science of the social side of life. Social psychology is defined as the branch of psychology that studies cognitive, effective, and behavioral processes of individuals as influenced by their group membership and interactions, and other factors that affect social life, such as social status, role, and social class. Social psychology examines the effects of social contacts on the development of attitudes, stereotypes,

Social Cognition is the manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember and use information about the social world, how we think about other people, our relationships with them and our social environment. We were asked to explain any two of the four concepts: Schemas, Heuristics, Sources of Error in Social Cognition, Affect and Cognition.
A schema is a mental concept that informs a person about what to expect from a variety of experiences and situations. Schemas are developed based on information provided by life experiences and are then stored in memory. Our brains create and use schemas as a short cut to make future encounters with similar situations easier to navigate.
A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next course of action. Heuristics are helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive

Maslow A. H. (1987) suggested that people need both esteem from other people as well as inner self-respect. Both of these needs must be fulfilled in order for an individual to grow as a person and achieve self-actualization. For example, a child who consistently receives overly critical or negative assessments from caregivers, family members, and friends will likely experience problems with low self-esteem.
Social Comparison - This refers to the process of comparing others to oneself and labelling their traits as being like (in-group) or unlike (out-group) your own, often associating positive or negative attributes with the group.
Self-knowledge - Self-knowledge informs us of our mental representations of ourselves, which contain attributes that we uniquely pair with ourselves. It is the knowledge of one's self and one's properties and the desire to seek such knowledge that guides the development of the self-concept. Self-knowledge helps us to look back on our performances and tweak our mistakes so that we do not repeat them the next time we perform our jobs. As we have come to the end of our journey, we can proudly admit that over the past weeks we have garnered a wealth of knowledge about our attitudes and behaviours and that of others that we may encounter in our everyday lives. We are most certain that this course gave us an insight about how we perceive