The effectiveness of taking online courses

All students are going to school to see other students and professors face-to-face for academic learning, but there are some students either have disabilities or students that do not like face-to-face community and decide not to go to school or instead take online...

Sense of Community

As humans, we all have the innate desire to belong in a group. As social creatures, we all desire to make interpersonal connections with one another. There is one field of psychology that is referred to as “community psychology.” Community psychology is...

Stigma and Social Media

In this blog I want to discuss the stigmatizing effects of social media and methods to protect yourself from those effects. Media and social media platforms play an important role in how we receive and digest information. The objectivity of media has long been debated...

Happiness in Communes?

  In my ealy 20s, right around the time when my friends started leaving their homes towns in search of emplyoyment in their fields after gaining their college degrees, I felt a stark lonliness in the pit of my stomach and thought to myself “Where did my...

The Nuclear Family vs. the Extended Family

In the United States and elsewhere in the Western world, the family structure considered to be the standard is the so-called nuclear family. This is two married parents with children. However, the actual percentage of children who grew up in these sorts of families is...

Older Adults and Community

Older adults are at an increased risk of experiencing loneliness. As people retire and experience the negative health effects of aging, they lose access to many common social activities, like work functions and all kinds of physically challenging group events like...

Sense of Community Created by New Urbanism

A sense of community as described by McMillan and Chavis includes membership, where those in a community feel they belong, influence, when a member feels they make a difference, integration and fulfillment of needs which is sharing of values, goods and resources, and...

The Bystander Effect: An Ongoing Challenge  

The crowding of urban centers brings into focus another notion—the bystander effect. This is a social phenomenon that explains how people are less likely to provide help in an emergency when other people are present. This post will be aimed at examining the relevance...

The Presence of Procrastination in Academic Settings

One of the first concepts taught to children through their education is the importance of completing an assignment or task at the expected time. However, many individuals have continued to struggle with this concept even throughout their adulthood. This concept is...

Lesson 11 Blog Entry Dana Matuszkiewicz

Being a part of a community whether it is online, or face-to-face is very important for us to grow as a person. Some may say face-to-face is a better form of communication while others think online is easier and works better for them. It is hard to really answer which...

Aggression in school

Aggression in schools show up in many forms, It can be hitting, kicking, name calling or the more extremes like bullying, school shootings, self harm. A lot of these types of aggression stem from specifically bullying, Bullying can be direct and indirect. Indirect is...

Discrimination in the Classroom

Discrimination and stereotyping in educational settings remain significant issues that impact students’ academic and personal growth. These biases manifest in various ways, from teachers’ unconscious prejudices to structural inequalities embedded in curricula and...

Education and Technology

Almost every student today has a cell phone. Generally, the message we hear from parents and teachers is that kids are always on them! And it’s partially true: according to a study by Radesky et. al. (2023), children in middle and high school spend an average of...

Intrinsic Motivation and Education

I am sure many of us have had conversations with people who talk about how pointless school is and how things they learned in high school will never be applied to their life. This feeling is not uncommon in many people, even in some who are in college but they stay in...

Observational Learning In Children

Observational learning is a critical concept in the field of psychology and it is particularly important in the sub-field of behavior science. Much of the foundation of for the subject of observational learning was set in place by Albert Bandura in his 1986...

Lesson 10 Blog Entry Dana Matuszkiewicz

Modern education targets students to learn things at a young age and then allowing them to use it in their everyday life. It plays a huge role on young kids because once they learn something it is always going to stick with them. If you teach a kid that bullying...

Does YouTube Allow Too Much Violence for Children? 

Platforms like YouTube are overflowing with content in the era of digital communication, most of which contains freely available violence for youngsters. This is a serious issue: can watching violent content on YouTube cause kids to see such behaviors as normal or...

The Effects of Being Exposed to Pornography

The use of technology during the past ten years has skyrocketed and all sorts of content is available to us whenever we feel like viewing it. The content we may view is pornography and the effects of being exposed to it can be harmful. Often it involves violence,...

The Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Violent Media

All forms of media, whether it be film, video games, social media, books, or the news influence everyone around the world in different ways. Many have benefited greatly from viewing or taking part in these forms of media. For example, the ability to learn about a new...

Social Media Impact

Internet or Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones have changed the face of communication and information consumption patterns. Imagine how what started as an independent tool for communication has now become indispensable in our social Book...

The Dean Scream and Framing

In This blog I want to talk about the ‘Dean Scream’ and framing. The Dean scream is an incident from 2004 where presidential candidate Howard Dean was at a rally giving a speech and after riling up the crowd with ideas of them achieving victory he yelled “Yeah”. The...

The 2020’s Combined with Fear in Media

Late 2019, we all know what’s coming, the coronavirus. Now, I’m not going to start talking about fear mongering or how the issue was ‘blown out of proportion’, because in my opinion, it wasn’t. Most of us were on the edge of our seats...

Tick Tock

As we all know, social media prevalence has increased, especially in younger generations. With the rise of popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X), came another social media platform known as TikTok. TikTok was created in 2018 when a video...

Internet Communication and Well Being

I have always had a hunch that the quality of interaction via online communication fails in comparison to face to face communication. I once took a trip where no technology was allowed to be had during the duration of the stay, and I when I returned back to the...

Lesson 9 Blog Entry Dana Matuszkiewicz

Miscommunication happens all around us in everyday life. This can be from text messages, emails in the workplace, direct messages, or even through voicemails. This can result in many issues that could be resolved from a phone call or even a simple face to face...

Lesson 9 Blog Entry Dana Matuszkiewicz

Miscommunication happens all around us in everyday life. This can be from text messages, emails in the workplace, direct messages, or even through voicemails. This can result in many issues that could be resolved from a phone call or even a simple face to face...

Retribution

What is the cost of a crime? Gruman et. al. (2017) identifies retribution as one of the goals of prison, and defines it as “to serve a sentence as ‘repayment’ for the crime”. It is generally agreed upon that going to jail, and therefore having...

The Advantages of House Arrest

For this blog post I want to talk about the differences between prison and house arrest. Americans have long been enamored by the idea of being ‘tough on crime’. It has been used as a political calling card and is seen as the main goal of prison by Americans since the...

Interrogations

The topic I will be talking about is Interrogations. When looking at this it is something that’s all over the world. They have many shows like 48 hours, and many more. I watch them all the time and I love it. Interrogations are one thing that helps the...

Tainted judges making wrong decision based on race.

In the judicial system, there are multiple pieces that will make it work, including witnesses, criminals, lawyers, judges, and jury. And judges could be one of the most important factors because they will put the defendant to trial and it will completely change their...

Criminal Behavior Analysis

Behavior analysis is the study and science of human behavior. Unlike the concepts of the mind and will power, behavior analysis studies more tangible things like behavioral health treatment and education that can be improved upon by making behavioral changes. Applied...

Interrogations And Investigations

The criminal justice process relies heavily on interrogations to furnish vital information. Suspects and witnesses alike may be interrogated. When the police suspect someone has committed a crime, they try to get that person into a room and interrogate them (which...

Problems with Juvenile Boot Camps

By the year 2000, there were over 70 correctional “boot camps” set up as an alternative to standard juvenile incarceration (Gruman et al, 2017). What are these boot camps? They were a military style correction method complete with uniforms, drills, PT,...

Blog Entry 8 Dana Matuszkiewicz

Our judicial system is so corrupt in so many ways and it has been like this for years. This is from traffic stops all the way until court rooms and sentencing. This will and has always been an issue. Our system never changes and is never fair. I think that our system...

Quiet Quitting

If you’ve spent any time on social media or news sites within the last couple of years, you’ve probably come across the term “quiet quitting.” This term refers to individuals meeting the minimum requirements of their job description and not putting in any additional...

Pros and Cons of Working with a Group

As you might suspect, there are a lot of pluses to working within a group, but there are minuses to it as well. I want to delve deeper into these complexities and their processes and which is of greater benefit in certain situations. According to the Social...

The Dynamics of Group Polarization within Sport Teams

As with any endeavor, success in sports hinges on teamwork. This often involves a coach and an athlete trying to come up with plans, encourage each other, and overcome obstacles. Unfortunately, this is the common psychology that people who work in groups tend to fall...

How does History Shape Intergroup Relations?

Some of us may consider history to be a boring subject, but everything about who we are, who our families are, our friends, and our fellow human beings, is a culmination of a long chain of events that pushed and pulled people and groups of people in one direction or...

Blog Entry 7 Dana Matuszkiewicz

Dealing with Tuckman’s notion of teamwork and behavior we have learned that it involves a few different ideas. The first idea is forming. The second idea is storming followed then by norming. Lastly the last idea relates to performing the idea. In an article I found...

Five Bases of Power

Power is one of the cardinal dimensions of social psychology in understanding the mechanisms by which individuals impose their will on, and control the behavior of, others. One way of grasping the dynamics of power is with the use of a metaphoric model of power. In...

Better Understanding Team Goal Setting

Team goal setting plays a major role in helping groups work efficiently & cohesively together. According to the text, different types of goals, such as outcome goals (winning), performance goals (self-comparison), and process goals (skill execution) serve as...

The Power of Belonging: Understanding Social Identity

Have you ever felt like you belonged somewhere? It could have been with a sports team, a club, or even just a group of friends. That feeling of belonging is a powerful one, and it’s rooted in a phenomenon called social identity. Social identity can simply be defined...

Diversity and Opportunity

How do people choose their careers? Some people choose a college major while they’re still in high school and stick with it. Some people “job shop” in their early twenties. Other people are inspired by someone they know or look up to. The common...

Exploring Groupthink

Groupthink is a concept introduced by Irving Janis in 1972, & it refers to the phenomenon where groups can make very poor decisions due the pressure of the majority consensus. Janis argued that groupthink was particularly common in situations when groups...

Hopelessness Depression

In Chapter 5 of our textbook, Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems by Jamie A. Gruman, Frank W. Schneider, and Larry M. Coutts, the authors discussed learned helplessness, the hopelessness theory of depression, and...

Parenting to Safeguard Against Teen Depression

As parents, we have many hopes and aspirations for our children. We want to protect them from the dangers of the world, mitigate sadness and pain, and help them grow into healthy and happy individuals. The preteen and teen years can be particularly challenging, as...

Self-Presentation in the Age of Social Media

People want others to think highly of them. The way we dress, how we act, and who we associate with, are all subconsciously in the back of our minds, influencing our behavior and causing tension when we fear we won’t be perceived positively or accepted....

Using Health Psychology to Manage Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is a chronic condition that affects millions of people all over the world. It can be related to genetics but also lifestyle factors such as being overweight, not eating a healthy diet, and lack of exercise. Treatment normally consists of a person...

Social Design and Hostile Architecture

The premise of social design is to build space consistent with the tenets of social psychology. Gruman et. al. (2017) discusses the implications of that definition: sometimes designers are called to design something that benefits the funder over the people it serves....

The Tragedy of the Commons in Today’s World

The famed Scottish economist Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations and widely regarded as the father of modern capitalism, had a theory. He believed that when people use a resource they are guided by an “invisible hand” that pushes them to exploit...

Talk about Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

The evolution of traditional cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) emphasizes the balance between acceptance and change and is a type of treatment distinguished by a dialectical approach. DBT advocates use “Devil’s advocate”...

Zen on Ice: Mindful Hockey Strategies

In professional hockey, where the competition is intense and the stakes are high, teams frequently deal with internal struggles and the weight of expectation. Blending together applied social psychology with insights like those from Lundgren et al. (2018), we can...

Action in Action

When I first heard the term participatory action research (PAR), thoughts of making protest signs, and marching in the streets ran through my mind. I have activism in my blood, I cannot help but be loud about my beliefs, to incite change where it must occur. I have...

Climate Change.

In Lesson 13, we learned about social change research, which is when “the researcher(s) are actively changing something in a social situation that they are a part of.” An issue that social change research could help is with environmental issues such as...

Social Change

Social change is an important aspect in society. As a whole, if there is a collective issue it typically takes one person with an idea to gather a group in order to create a social change agenda. Walden University discusses that there are four major ways that social...

Online Activism

Activism research is vital when it comes to politics or any topic that could have different points of view. This type of research has become more common due to the internet. Approximately 72% of Americans use social media and 84% of young adults have at least one...

Social change is the way human interactions and relationships transform cultural and social institutions over time, having a profound impact on society (Dunfey, 2023). Social change research involves researchers actively changing something in a social situation they...