Behind Bars on Either Side

When a loved one goes to prison, it feels as though you yourself are in prison as well.  I have experienced a loved one, behind bars and I can honestly say it has been one of the most challenging times of my life.  Those who believe that the prison system is fair are...

Three Factors in Wrongful Conviction

After reading the lesson on the justice system in my applied social psychology class, I began to wonder why there are so many innocent people in prison. What factors took place to result in innocent people being convicted for crimes they did not commit? This is a...

The Bystander Effect

On March 13, 1964, a 28 year old woman was stabbed to death in Queens, NY. This woman’s name was Kitty Genovese, and her story inspired psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley to coin the “bystander effect”. As Kitty was being assaulted, there were 38 bystanders...

Private Prisons in America

By definition, a prison is “to protect society by removing a criminal from the streets and to punish the criminal for their antisocial behavior” (Gruman et al., 2017, p.311). Some other goals are general and specific deterrence, rehabilitation, denunciation, and...

Reducing Crime and The Importance of Rehabilitation

The criminal justice system and psychology is one of my favorite topics. It really allows you to understand why people do what they do, the risk factors, and how we can combat crime.  As well as the most effective ways to rehabilitate inmates and orchestrate prisons...

People and Power

  The exercise of power has a significant impact on an individual’s life, having an effect not just on the person’s behavior but also on their thoughts, values, and convictions on the inside. The Metamorphic Model of Power, which was suggested by...

More Bad than Good? Pros and Cons of Groupthink

In this week’s lesson we learned quite a bit about groups, teams, etc, and how they work and what could make them better or worse. One topic interested me in particular and that was about groupthink. What is groupthink? Groupthink can be defined as “a...

Work Teams VS Psychology

Group work? Ideas? Working with others? These are all the things we have to deal with when working with companies. We must get familiar with new people, their workstyle, and being capable of listening to others’ ideas.  When it comes to hearing others ideas, I...

The Chaos of a Team Without Structure

In the discussion, I talked about a team I was a part of that followed Tuckerman’s stages. Now, I will talk about a team that seemed not to have any structure whatsoever, and it nearly collapsed before it achieved anything. I was sent to Oregon Ballistics...

Dangers of Groupthink

Groupthink is described as a process in which flawed decision making occurs as a result of appeasing and avoiding conflict with other group members. (Coutts et al., 2016)  This is so apt because, as far as I can remember I have seen the pitfalls of groupthink in...

Much talent, little success.

A very old proverb says that “it is like the ego to take and like the spirit to share” and this is a key to successful teamwork, let’s use the concept of a team that makes a group, “two or more people who interact with each other in such a way that each person...

Collective Efficacy in Teams

When we look at winning sports teams, or efficient businesses, they all have a few things in common. They have collective efficiency, social and task cohesion, confidence in themselves and their teammates and a common goal (“Us against the World”: How Having a “Common...

Double Teams

Recreation sporting teams, one of the most critical teams a kid can be a part of at a young age.  The hustle and the bustle of having practice, weekly games winning, losing, tie breakers that all lead to a championship.  Well it’s all fun and games until the team you...

Cohesion and Team Performance

If you have ever been a part of a sports team, you may be aware of how cohesion affects team performance. Cohesion can be defined as “a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency of a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of its instrumental...

Football and Psychology-It’s a love story

I never thought I would see the day. Football and psychology become one. I have never been into sports, especially when it comes to watching them on TV. Now that I live with my boyfriend, Monday nights are now for football. Since I love him oh so much, I have been...

Combating Racism

Social Dominance Theory (SDT) and Social Identity Theory (SIT) are two psychological frameworks that offer valuable insights into the dynamics of racism and provide avenues to combat it. These theories help us grasp how individuals and groups perceive and interact...

Racism. Stereotypes. Prejudice. Microaggressions.

Racism. A bias against an individual or a group of individuals based on their race or ethnicity. Although the definition seems clear, the experience of racism can be one of uncertainty and confusion. Usually when people think of racism, their mind directs them to...

Coalition building against racism.

Social categorization is when our brain has already detected the gender, race, and relative age of a face. This process is based on the social cognitive mechanism, which is the process of classifying people. This social categorization process is automatic, and we all...

How Racism Affects Mental Health

Past trauma is one of the main causes for serious mental health conditions, according to Mental Health America. For people of color, traumatic experiences can occur everyday. Discrimination, negative behavior towards a certain group of people, and prejudice, a...

Sexism

As a 44-year-old woman, I am no stranger to sexism. I can look back and recall sexism I faced going back to childhood. Obviously, I didn’t see it for what it was at the time. Even into my twenties, I felt ill equipped to speak up for myself when confronted with sexist...

Racism and Microaggressions

Racism can be defined as “bias against an individual or a group of individuals based on the individual’s or group members’ race/ethnicity (Gruman et al., 2017). Racism has been an issue for humans for as long as we can remember. Even though we are making positive...

Fate of Control- Karma

What is obvious to one could be ever so not obvious to others. The system of beliefs we have that seem obvious, no need to be proven, otherwise, implicit understandings of how the world works are known as axions (Gruman, Schneider, & Coutts, 2020). These axioms...

The 5 Social Beliefs

This week, I was really interested in the research done by Leung and Bond on different belief systems. Leung and Bond used factor analysis to determine five clusters of social beliefs that are pancultural, meaning they exist across all cultures. (Gruman, et al., 2017)...

The Importance of Social Support

Social support is important for all of us in general, but it becomes increasingly important when we go through hard times. Social support plays a big role in how we handle situations and shapes our experiences, which is why I wanted to talk more about how social...

Social Anxiety to the Surface

One of the biggest mental health disorder that has come to the surface in a rapid uproar has been social anxiety. Feels like thanks to COVID when it basically smacked us in the face back in 2020, social anxiety came to the surface in all types of different...

Fear Appeal is Real

Have you ever seen a health related commercial that triggered a negative emotion? The negative emotion caused by the commercial could have been threatening, disgust or you may have even felt scared. To further elaborate on this question and offer an example, maybe you...

Once Pure Haven Turned Aquatic Dumpster

The Pasig River is a passing water that makes its way through the central urban section of Metro Manila. It is a rich body of water that helped give resources long before and during the Spanish colonial period (Sicat,2023). Looking now, it is quite the opposite. It...

Change in Leadership: Changing for Success

Being a follower  The amount of literature leadership that is available vastly exceeds that of followership. We often hear about the remarkable success of great leaders; we hear about their experiences from a leadership perspective and not a followership perspective....

The environmental aspects of mental health.

In this weeks lesson we learned about how the environment impacts behavior and the significance of resource dilemmas. For a discussion post, I chose to write about how the idea of clearing land for commercial buildings could destroy ecosystems and be a negative...

Littering in Poor SES Communities

Recently, my boyfriend and I were driving home. We turned on our road and were a few houses away (we live in the city) when we see the car in front of us toss some trash out the window of the driver side. We both gave each other that look, and fully expected to see...

Industry Influence and Deceptive Practices

Social change research studies both subjective and objective experiences in order to help improve government public policy, business patterns, educational institutions, and other interventions that can help improve injustices in society (RMIT Social Change Platform,...

Wolf Reintroduction in CO: Activism Research

I relocated to Colorado in December of 2021. I have absolutely loved every second of life out here and do not plan on leaving any time soon. Colorado is a beautiful state where wildlife is abundant. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, a bill was passed to...

‘Grief Tech’: Grief and AI

I was startled at the title of this article. Grief is a human reaction, an impossible response towards loss and tying technology that can almost do everything except feel human emotions, how could this possibly help? This week’s lesson talked about Media and...

The Appeal of PAR research in Small Communities

I come from a small town. This small town is also on sovereign lands. This would be an interesting place to conduct PAR, especially since the members our community understand the importance of working together.  The appeal of PAR research and this particular method of...

Healthcare Research

As our day-to-day life and technology evolve so does the technology and research in the healthcare field. As a healthcare worker I have had the privilege to see the healthcare field in just the four years I have worked in it. It has allowed me to see how many...

PAR Benefits School Systems

Racism is still very prevalent in our world today. Having participatory action research (PAR) can help schools. The education system is where students, teachers, parents, etc. all interact but students spend the most time with one another. Social interaction happens...

Participatory Action Research and The Future

Participation action research was a new concept to me until this week’s assignment. I was actually a little surprised seeing how psychology students normally hear various psychological terms, research methods, and theories pretty continuously throughout their studies....

The Criticisms of PAR

Social change research is an important tool for addressing real-world social problems and promoting positive change. By involving diverse stakeholders and empowering communities, social change research can lead to more comprehensive solutions that promote equity and...

Controversial Activist Research

There are many topics that would be considered controversial in the United States today. In fact, there are probably too many “controversial” topics, some of these include, police brutality, climate change, or genetic engineering. Within each of these topics, there is...

M4BL from Activist research

Activist research is a type of research that is conducted with the goal of creating social change or advancing a specific social or political agenda. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a coalition of Black activists and organizations formed in 2014, in response to...

The Similarity-Attraction Theory means Harmony

The similarity-attraction effect is a well-established phenomenon in social psychology that has been studied extensively for several decades. The effect was first described by psychologist Theodore Newcomb in the 1960s, who found that college roommates who shared...

My Brain Can’t Take the Stimulus

This weeks lessons were extremely interesting for me. The topic that stood out to me the most was definitely the one about how our brains were not designed for all of this constant and overloading stimulation. We spent most of our history as humans as hunter gatherers...

Social Change Research

Our world continues to be flooded with new complex social issues at every corner and the need for effective solutions is becoming increasingly urgent. I believe social change research could be a promising approach to ever growing social issues. Social change research...

Participatory Research in Healthcare

Participatory research is an approach to research that involves active participation from the people being studied, such as patients and their families. This approach is becoming increasingly popular in healthcare research due to its potential to improve the quality...

Social Change

Social change is how human interactions change and transform culture and have huge social changes to society. If you are wondering why we should care about social change it is because it is happening all around us without you even knowing it. There are always constant...

Relationships in reality and expectations

When it comes to marriage there are people who do not stay committed to their relationship because they have higher expectations in their relationships and cannot settle for the reality of a true married relationship. One of the first expectations people have about...

The Matching Phenomenon

An aspect of attraction that has always fascinated me is the matching phenomenon. This phenomenon entails the unique way that most people subconsciously look for long-term partners who are attractive enough for them but not more attractive than they are (Gruman et...

Attachment: Anxiety and Memory aren’t Best Friends.

Attachment: Anxiety and Memory aren’t Best Friends.   Our attachment style says a lot about us. Our attachment style gives us a blueprint on how we act, how we react, and how we cope if troubles should arise with our friends or romantic partner. If we actually know...

Love & Life

The two L’s is what I call it. Our lesson this week captures relationships and everyday life. Love and lies are part of relationships and everyday life whether we know it or not it is a fragment of what is part of being human. Love and lies both are applied in...

Identifying Adult Attachment Styles

In psychology, an attachment style is “a specific pattern of behavior in and around relationships” (Gonsalves, 2023). Everyone will have attachment styles throughout their lives, including when they are infants and adults. The four adult attachment styles...

Pretty Privilege

Have you ever been given a free muffin with your morning coffee? Has someone offered to take some work off your plate just because? Perhaps you always get served first at the bar even if there were people waiting there before you. If these things have happened to you,...

Borderline Personality Disorder and Relationships

Not many people know what borderline personality disorder is and its is not like you change personalities. To define BPD, “Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a condition that affects the way a person processes everyday emotions and reactions”...

Jealousy for human interaction

Jealousy is a subjective, negative, and even hostile emotion. It is an experience that people experience when they feel threatened in the cognitive comparison of their subjective distance (value) with others (Pfeiffer & Wong, 1989). Some scholars define envy as a...

Attraction: Did We Just Become Best Friends?

Attraction is an extremely interesting subject. What makes someone attracted to another person? Is it their physical appearance? Their personality? Is it some combination of both? Generally, people who are similar in looks or personality find each other more...

Online Communities is the New Face

The traditional face-to-face communities seem to have weakened. When we think of this, we think of the endless possibilities of why the new resource is online to have people engage with each other. According to an article, “During the past 10 years, the rapid...

Sense of Community in Sports

Throughout this lesson, we learned about the sense of community which is “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through commitment to be...

Big City Stress

Over the last decade, more and more people have been moving to big cities and leaving quiet rural towns for a variety of reasons, including career possibilities, cultural attractions, higher education, diversity, and convenience. They provide a concentration of jobs...

Online communities influence social norms.

The internet has gained the ability to alter not only society but also people individually, behaviorally, and emotionally. One of the reasons these influences have occurred is due to mass media. This this being said, people like to be involved and or change their...

Stimulus Overload and Altruism

Our environment presents us with various forms of continuous stimulation. Whether it’s sitting in traffic, watching a television show, smelling freshly made coffee in your office, or listening to music in your sunroom while writing an assignment for class, we are...

Mediated Communication

Do you ever think about the past and how in essence, we are the last generation to grow up without being surrounded by social media and technology? We had our childhood consisting of playing outside and getting our feet dirty and learning social skills through face to...

Online Social Communities and Psychology

Social media has became a part of almost everyone’s lives, everyone owns a phone for the most part and can access the internet. The point is that everyone can access and use social media if they want to and engage with others on the internet. Many people can...

The Importance of the Bystander Effect

A topic that was talked about this week in the textbook is the bystander effect which, “occurs when multiple people who witness an emergency situation fail to intervene” (Gruman & Schneider, 2005). This goes hand in hand with the diffusion of responsibility which...

Self-Determination Theory and Education

Do you remember being motivated to do well in school? Do you remember why? Perhaps it was your parents telling you that you had to get your homework done in order to go hang out with your friends. Maybe you wanted to make good grades so that you could get into a...

Procrastination and Academic Performance

Procrastination is a common problem among students of all ages, and it can have a significant impact on their academic abilities and performance. As noted in the study by Kármen et al. (2015), there is a significant negative correlation between procrastination and...

Observation Learning

Children are very easily influenced. They see someone doing something, then all of a sudden they are doing it, too. Especially when it is an adult. Children look up to adults. As described in our lesson for this week, Albert Bandura performed an experiment involving...

Education

Every person is different with various thought process and comprehension skills when it comes to learning. There are children who are gifted intellectually and there are other children who need extra help with comprehending and learning new things. If we were all the...

Social Learning

Humans are social creature and often learn through observing others. We learn through others actions and words and see what is rewarded and how successful they are at a task or job. When learning something new I often have to watch someone else do it to feel confident...

The Importance of Self-Determination Theory

Self-determination theory links student motivation and academic behavior together. According to the theory, everyone has three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy refers to feeling like you have control of your life and having the...

Self-Determination and Education

Education has been constantly changing, throughout history and even more in recent years. Recently, because of the pandemic that caused the country into lockdown, the education system had to find a new way to teach students without going to physical school. This...

Bias in teaching and learning

People have a natural tendency to bias. The natural and normal instinct of human nature drives people to make one-sided and subjective judgments on the present things according to the present situation and personal preference, and then take corresponding behaviors....