Personal Experience in Incorporating Psychological Concepts - Essay Example

?Personal experience in incorporating psychological concepts People’s interactions in macro-social set up influences their behavior, attitudes and interpersonal relations. An individual’s rationale for example plays a major role in the person’s perception of his or her environment and the person’s possible reactions to the environment’s factors. This scope of people’s behaviors and their cognitive potentials forms the scope of psychology. The subject is therefore instrumental in facilitating personal awareness as well as awareness of a society within which a person lives. In this paper, I explore a personal experience that incorporated psychological concepts and explains the concepts and their incorporation into the experience. One of my vivid experiences is my involvement in an accident during my vacation in my first year of college. The scope of the experience makes it outstanding and memorable in my life because it was horrific and exposed me to numerous psychological factors and concepts. One of the factors to intellectual diversity of the experience was its scope that involved different social stakeholders with different roles and, to some extent, difference cognitive approaches to resolving issues. Being involved in an accident along a busy road also played a major role because many people converged at the scene and I was a victim of their psychological reactions. The most identifiable classes of people in the experience were the police, motorists, pedestrians, and my family and each stakeholder had a different reaction to the whole episode. In the experience, I got involved in an accident whose scope portrayed gross negligence on my side as a drive that never cared about other road users and some people were quick to judge me as a racist who was out to kill a member of a minority race. Investigations and an honest eye witnessed however saved me from what appeared to be a cyclist’s suicidal act that also risked my life. It was on a Sunday afternoon and I was driving to watch a basketball league match. I however realized that I left home too early and preferred to drive along the streets instead of idling in the stadium. I was keen on the road, as I normally am and noticed a stationary cyclist at a cross junction. I planned to cross my line to the opposite side, the side at which the cyclist was. He was however facing my direction and even though I could have been very rational, it was an extreme situation and I did not expect anything wrong. I slowed down as I approached the junction, checked that the road was clear, and accelerated the vehicle. It was however unfortunate that as my vehicle sped, the cyclist attempted to cross the road just in from of my car and he was too close that I did not even have time to notice him. For a moment, I imagined that I did not hit him but then noticed him, through the side mirror, lying on the road. I stopped my vehicle right in the middle of the road and strode back to where three vehicles had already stopped and people were converging. A young woman shouted at me, calling me a murderer, a middle-aged man advised me to rush the cyclist to the nearest hospital while an elderly man warned me of touching the man who lay still as though he was already dead. The elderly man told me to call the police who then arrived almost immediately. I insisted that the police call my parents and my father arrive just before I was driven to a police station. He asked for my side of the story, pressed for the truth, and then assured me that everything would be fine. All these happened alongside mixed reactions as my car blocked the road and the victim was victim was pronounced dead by paramedics. The police questioned me and booked me in before my family bailed me two hours later. The entire episode identified many concepts of psychology among the people at the accident scene and the police station. One of the identifiable psychological concepts is schema. This defines “an organized way of interaction” with the environment (Kalat, 161) and may depend on cultural or professional practices. Diversified expressions and actions communicated such organization within the society. The culture of calling the police in case of an accident was evident and is commonly held among road users. Professional scope of the police’s law enforcement also had to be followed and I was booked in for questioning prior to litigation process. Another psychological concept that manifested in the experience is “self-fulfilling prophesy,” an anticipation that stimulates a person’s reaction in a way that the anticipated thing or phenomenon manifests (Coon and Mitterer, 580). The concept manifested in my fear of being held in custody and even though the accident was horrifying enough, the thought of staying behind bars broke me into tears. This, as my father and the in charge of police station later confessed, facilitated efforts and leniency towards my bail out that was processed very fast and I was released to go home (Coon and Mitterer, 580). The concept of “representative heuristics,” an assumption that a “sample is representative of a larger population,” of which it is a member, also manifested in the experience (Nevid, 259). The young woman who harshly judged me as a murderer for example expressed a generally held perception that motorist are always responsible for accidents that involve them and other road users. She could therefore not imagine, at the first instinct, that I could have been the victim of the cyclist reckless behavior. I similarly assumed that like other responsible road users, the cyclist would not move after I had gotten so close to him. “Counter factual thinking” is another psychological concept that applied to the experience (152). It defines the “tendency to imagine alternative outcomes” in situation (Sanderson, 152). This particularly happened in me as I came to reality that a person had died in my hands and I wished that I never drove along the road or that the person could have just suffered a minor injury. Harsh reactions from pedestrians and the fear of being held behind bars also made wish that I was never involved in that accident (Sanderson, 152). Attribution theory is another psychological concept that applied to the situation. It defines personal explanation of “cause of other people’s behavior,” and the police and I developed personal ideas of the behaviors and actions that led to the accident (Sanderson, 112). This was evidence in the questioning process in which the police theorized my intention to run over the man and I also believed that the man’s psychological condition could have influenced his behavior that caused the accident (Sanderson, 112). The experience therefore exposed me to people’s behaviors and reasoning through their reactions to the accident in which I was involved. It also identified a number of psychological concepts such as schema, self-fulfilling prophesy, representative heuristics, counter factual thinking and attribution theory. Works cited Coon, Denis, and Mitterer, John. Introduction to psychology: Gateways to mind and behavior. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 2008. Print. Kalat, James. Introduction to psychology. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 2010. Print. Nevid, Jeffrey. Psychology: Concepts and applications. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 2012. Print. Sanderson, Catherine. Social psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Print. Read More