SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING & DESIGN

FOUNDATION IN NATURAL AND BUILD ENVIRONMENT

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY – PSYC0103

JOURNAL

Name: TEO CHONG YIH

Student ID: 0314660

Program: FNBE APRIL INTAKE 2013

Assignment: Journal

Lecturer: Miss Peng Chia Yee

Date of submission: DECEMBER 17, 2013

December 10, 2013

The topic of today class is “conformity and group behavior”. Conformity is groups’ size of

consistency to a point but it always will appear dissenter. However, there is only small group of

dissenter when they meet with large group of conformer they started to become confidence less

then finally obey and follow the conformer. According to Controversial landmark experiment in

1960 by Stanly Milgram there are some dissenter will call a stop but when examiner call them to

keep on going the experiment most of the dissenter will obey and follow the instruction, only

little amount of dissenter will stop. Besides, Miss Peng also told us about Zimbardo’s Prison

experiment which shows the power of situations and situations appropriate behavior. The

experiment shows that those students which act as a prison security police tend to gain power

and take control over the prisoner, in opposite way those student which pretend as prison became

weak and easy to be control this indicate the behavior change of a person when the situation

given the power to the person. Besides, we also learnt about the influence of other people which

so called bystander effect. The bystander effect is when people are less likely to help when they

are in groups than when alone, this is because of diffusion of responsibility and ambiguous

situation. After all, I feel that every time of our behavior is always affected by another people

and situation, which will change our thinking and affect our decision making. So, I will ask

myself whenever making a decision is it affect by the others.

November 19, 2013

Today topic is attitude and social judgments. Attitudes are positive or negative of object thoughts

which include social issues, groups, institution, consumer product, and people. There are 3

components in attitude which is cognitive, affective and behavioral. The factors in changing

attitude are source, message and receiver. Cognitive component is beliefs or idea, affective

component is emotions feelings, and behavioral component is predisposition to act. Moreover,

we also learnt about theories of attitude chance – learning. There are 3 conditioning which are

evaluative conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. Evaluative

conditioning is about emotion or affective component, operant conditioning is open expression

such as reward and punishment, and observational learning is monkey see monkey do. Operant

conditioning is a form of learning in which response come to be controlled by their consequences.

Miss Peng also shows us a Skinner box experiment to indicate the process of operant

conditioning. Besides, I also learnt about type of reinforcement which consists of primary and

secondary reinforcement. Reinforcement also can be classified into two types which is positive

and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is positive reasons which encourage us to do

something in the other hand negative reinforcement is negative reasons which cause us to do

something. I found that this lecture is very helpful which allow me to understand more about

attitude of people and social judgment.