A Portfolio of Short Assessment Tasks - Assignment Example

A Portfolio of Assessments of the of the A Portfolio of Assessments Portfolio Task One of the goals of psychology is to make us understand human behavior. Adult individuals act according to their own behaviors. The branch of psychology that studies people’s behaviors in the context of society is named social psychology. Many researchers from the branch of social psychology have found that people may act not according to their behaviors, but through the behaviors that they acquire under the influence of other individuals, social group, or groups. This approach of studying of an individual’s behavior falls under the discipline of social psychology. Social psychology studies factors that influence individual behaviors in various social situations (Baron, Byrne, & Branscombe, 2007 ). Conformity and obedience are social influences that cause changes (“Frostburg State University”, n.d.) of human behaviors. Conformity defines people’s behaviors that result from a group pressure (“Psychology and Society”, n.d.); obedience is also individuals’ behaviors that result from pressure or instructions (“Simply Psychology”, n.d.). The above review explains that individuals’ behaviors to a greater extent are influenced by other people’s opinion and beliefs. At the same time the change of behavior under pressure does not necessarily implies the change of underlying belief of the same individuals. In 1936, Sherif (Dewey, n.d.) demonstrated convergence of perceptions of different individuals when they are in a group. Later in 1950, Solomon Asch experimentally demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. Asch (“Age of the Sage”, n.d.) showed that when individuals were placed in a group of confederates whose duty was to make the incorrect decision, the individuals about 37% of the time went along with the incorrect decision. Asch also found that level of conformity depends of the concentration of confederates. For example, level of one confederate failed to make any impact; however, significant conformity was observed with the growth of the concentration of confederates. The researchers found the several factors that cause conformity of individual behavior. Some of them are: A person wants to fit in with the group; A person is of being rejected by others; A person publicly accepts the view while rejecting privately; A person’s lack of knowledge leads to group guidance; A person in an ambiguous situation compares own behavior with the group. From the viewpoint of social psychology, obedience exhibits the change of behavior of an individual caused by the command of the authority. The brightest example of obedience is WW II criminal case of Adolph Eichmann, who killed millions of Jews. In his defense, Eichmann claimed he just followed the order given to him. This probably raises an issue that Eichman would have gotten killed had he not followed his superior’s orders. It may be considered that Eichmann just displayed obedience to the order given by his authorities. Obedience thus is a form of social influence when a person acts in response to an order, otherwise the person would not have acted in this way. Social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted empirical researches to study obedience from the psychological viewpoint. His experimental study revealed 65 % of the participants displayed the sadistic behavior in order to be obedient subjects; they did not hesitate to punish through administrating 450 volts of electric current into the human bodies.(“Simply Psychology”, n.d.). Milgram’s experiment of electric shock was repeated in other places; in one, experiment 85% of participants administrated lethal electric shock to display the obedience to the authority (“Muskinham University”, n.d). Milgram’s study helped people understand insight of Nazi cruelty in WW II and My Lai massacre in Vietnam by American soldiers. Conformity and obedience are two extreme sides of social psychology that exhibit that social pressure as norms of majority and obedience as norms of superior command, which tend to change an individual’s underlying perceptions, opinions of moral and ethics. That is why; these two behaviors are interesting to psychologists who tend to determine factors that cause the changes of human behavior. Portfolio Task 2 Your ‘Student’ Self – Construct Development Phase COMPLETE THIS GRID FIRST Actual self Respected Student David Student Friend Sarah Non-student Friend Thomas Not Respected Student Mehmet Respected Lecturer Templeton Not Respected Lecturer Chan Uses imagination and own ideas 0 0 x Recipe like works Good communicator 0 0 x Bad communicator Good learners x 0 0 Poor learner Friendly 0 0 x Unfriendly Offers help when requested 0 0 x Avoids when requested for help Listen carefully 0 x 0 Constantly interrupt Cordial 0 0 x Unfriendly Relaxed x 0 0 Intense Ambitious 0 0 x Unenthusiastic Responsible 0 x 0 Irresponsible Approachable 0 0 x Intimidating Your ‘Student’ Self – Rating Phase COMPLETE THIS GRID SECOND 7 Actual self Respected Student David Student Friend Sarah Non-student Friend Thomas Not Respected Student Mehmet Respected Lecturer Templeton Not Respected Lecturer Chan Ideal Self 1 Uses imagination and own ideas 3 5 5 4 6 6 3 5 Recipe like works Good communicator 5 3 5 5 6 4 3 6 Bad communicator Good learners 6 4 4 3 3 7 6 7 Poor learner Friendly 6 4 4 4 7 5 2 4 Unfriendly Offers help when requested 6 5 5 4 2 5 5 4 Avoids when requested for help Listen carefully 4 4 3 2 3 6 5 7 Constantly interrupt Cordial 7 5 5 5 7 7 5 6 Unfriendly Relaxed 2 5 6 2 6 5 6 5 Intense Ambitious 7 4 4 7 6 7 6 7 Unenthusiastic Responsible 7 5 4 3 2 6 6 7 Irresponsible Approachable 6 5 5 5 6 6 6 5 Intimidating In statistics, a prediction or an observation is examined by stating null and alternative hypothesizes, which are, in fact, two opposite extremes of the prediction or observation. George Kelly (“Asociacion Espanolade Psicoterapias Cognitivas”, n.d.), an American psychologist, claimed that human being interpret and understands events through creating bipolar in nature hypothesis. This task of this assignment studies Student Self. The events referred in the grid can be described as characterization of the student and different individuals associated with the same student. The student and all other individuals around the “Actual Self” are a respected student, a student friend, a non-student friend, a not respected student, a respected lecturer, and a not-respected lecturer. Kelly’s concept is applied to characterize all of the above individuals through several attributes. The attributes that are used to differentiate individuals in the above grid are named as constructs. The constructs are nothing but bipolar “null” and “alternative” statements of an observation. This study has selected 11 different constructs to characterize individuals of the experiment. For example; “good learner” as opposed to the “poor learner”, “ambitious” as opposed to the “unenthusiastic”, and “responsible” as opposed to the “irresponsible” are three of the eleven constructs. Each of these constructs can be viewed as a bipolar characterization of an attribute with implicit and explicit ends. The qualities "good learner", "ambitious", and "responsible person" are expected ends of constructs, while “bad learner”, “unenthusiastic”, and “irresponsible” are unexpected ends of constructs. The repertory grid (“Enquire Within”, n.d.) characterizes the ideal “student self” with the rating for each construct. The values and belief, which are important to me, are represented through the constructs and its ratings. Kelly repertory grid’s important aspects are constructs. The bipolar constructs characterize all participating elements, in this case different individuals, and develop a cognitive map based on our anticipation of events. The grid demonstrates who we are and what we want to be. In this experiment, it was difficult to define the constructs with two extreme ends. The goal was to present an ideal “student self” through attributes. This was achieved using a rating system from 1 to 7 for two extremes of an attribute. First the “ideal self” was rated, and all other “elements” of the grid were rated later with respect to the “ideal self” element. Defining construct and allocation of ratings to different individuals were a difficult task, and I think it would be easier to create a grid in an interview with a counselor or therapist. Personal Construct Theory (PCT) states an individual is regularly making reasoning of events that the individual encounters daily (“The Psychology of Personal Constructs”, n.d.). Through the reasoning, people try to understand others and themselves. Kelly defined this human behavior as behavior of scientists; in other words, Kelly imagines Man is a scientist. His fundamental postulate states that process in the human mind are psychologically directed by human anticipation of events. In this regard, constructs as a tool provides a cognitive map for directing future behavior based on the human made anticipations of outcomes. The tool “construct” in PCT illustrates two meanings of equal importance; it defines how a person perceived his or her experience, and what the same person wants to see in the future. This perhaps, in short describes the theoretical usefulness of Kelly’s theory. Since the outcome of PCT in 1955 its practical usefulness has penetrated to different domains including cognitive science, education, organizational development, business and marketing (“University of Southampton”, n.d.). Nevertheless, one of the predominant practical applications of it is in the area study of families, individuals, and social groups with the emphasis how individual and people organize and change their views of self and those others who surround them. An idiographic approach involves the study of individual cases or events; a nomothetic approach involves the formulation of general laws. In developing the theory and technique, Kelly pursued to study the behavior of individual people in more objective way; removing the influence of observer’s reference frame. That is why; PCT is more idiographic approach than nomothetic. Kelly wanted to find individual differences among people. That is why; he introduced the “construct” concept, which offers more predictive method in understanding individual differences among people. It also eliminates method of forcing people to answer questions about things they may never even have thought about before. Introspection is inward looking examination of own feelings and thoughts. Repertory grid is a technique that capture’s structure and dimensions of personal meaning of events. In the repertory grid technique, a research or phenomenon is studied from an individual’s viewpoint; constructs describe the structure of an individual’s viewpoint of the event, and rating illustrates dimensions of the same structure. Portfolio Task 3 Choices, behaviors, and beliefs demonstrate how an individual perceives others. These parameters can group human in similar and different groups. Psychology of individual differences and individual similarity is a vital area of social psychology, which studies how social phenomena influence an individual, and how people interact with others (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999). One part of psychologists believes that all individuals are identical from the social, psychological, and cognitive development viewpoint. Other part considers that individuals differ from the viewpoint of abilities, personalities, and motivation mood. In this context, this section presents an argumentative review whether it is more important for psychologists to understand the ways in which we are all similar than the ways in which we are all different. The individual difference approach is based on the assumption that people are unique. Colin Copper (2002) explains significant variation in people from biological and physiological viewpoints. Some children develop more quickly than other; some drugs have much more of an effect on some individuals than on others, and many physiological measures marked variation from person to person. Some individuals seem more obedient to authority or more prejudiced than others. At the same time, many psychological theories consider people are all much the same; developmental psychologist observes that all children develop in broadly similar way, physiological psychologists assume that everyone has much the same sort of structure and will operate in much the same way. This argumentative essay reviews of individual differences and individual similarity from the perspective of social psychology. It studies individual behavior that are influenced either by the actual or implied presence of other individuals; it also studies how individual attitude on many issues or events are influenced by the belief of group verbal and nonverbal behaviors, aggression, conformity and prejudice (Simmons & Estes, 2008; ). Uhlman and Nosek (2012) examined people’s perceptions of their racial biases and their explanations about it. The researchers conducted two studies; the first one with 106 White undergraduate students, and the second one with 74 White undergraduate students. The majority of 74 students believed that if they did have stereotypical thoughts, this would occur because of their culture socialized them (Uhlmann & Nosek, 2012). The participants expressed that they were automatically prejudiced because of their biases to cultural socialization. Many participants expressed spontaneous negative thoughts and feelings toward minorities, which they found difficult to control consciously. The issues that are dealt in the social psychology relate to the problems of human behavior. Furthermore, social psychology studies behavior of human beings in their reactions to other human beings (Cox Miles, n.d.). Social psychology covers a broad area from psychology to sociology. The individual differences do not play an equal part in this extensive territory. The role of individual differences tends to diminish to the vanishing point as the sociologist treat social psychology in terms of generalized social laws (Cox Miles, n.d.). However, the significance of the value of individual differences gradually increases from the vanishing point as social psychology enlarges the general field of psychology where experimental, clinical, genetic, and abnormal psychological events become the center of activity. Study of similarity and differences is fundamental in psychology. Cooper Colin (2002) explains that how and why some individuals are different from others is an intriguing issue in its own right. According to Cooper, study of individual differences measures abilities, knowledge, personality, mood, and other characteristics, which are important to clinical psychologists, nurses, teachers, and career counselors in order to diagnose learning difficulties, dyslexia, level of depression or seek to assess an individual’s suitability for promotion or suitably of a post that requires enormous attention to detail. However, social psychology studies individual’s manner under the influence of another individual or group of individuals. In this regard, I hold the opinion that it is important for social psychologist to understand the ways we are all similar. Portfolio Task 4 Question 1 Moral principles are the ethical codes established to ensure that researchers and participants abide by certain standards of conduct. Even though all scientific experiments follow such codes, but experiments in psychology are especially important because of the subject matter of the topic. Psychological researches involve human and animal; all research involving living creatures can cause physical and psychological harms to the participants of the experiment. In this context, Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo’s experiments on obedience underwent criticism on ethical issues. Zimbardo’s mock prison experiment also was questioned on ethical issues. Most experts agree that while conducting research with human subjects in the field of psychology, potential benefit to society must be weighed using ethical guidelines. The ethical guidelines contain whole spectrum of regulations that must be followed before, during, and after the experiment. The Code of Human Research Ethics published by the British Psychological Society (BPS) provides such guidelines. Consent to the experiment, providing sufficient information to the participants, maintaining the confidentiality of participants - are some of many guidelines that BPS recommends for conducting psychological experiments. The above-mentioned experiments violated the norms stated in the BPS guidelines for physical harm, psychological harm that may be caused to the participants. Question 2 Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity theory states a person’s sense or recognition of who he or she is based on their group membership (McLeod, 2008). Muzafer Sharif’s Realistic theory explains that, in competition for resources, one social group tends to have friction over another social group. Both theories describe human prejudice, which later can grow into “in group” and “out group” social catastrophe. The “us” or “them” attitude expressed in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, Bosnians and Serbs in Yugoslavia, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda are all example of Social Identity Theory. It should be noted that resource is not the issue in the above examples. On the other hand, when immigrants from specific ethnic background arrive in large numbers causing job problems for native inhabitants creates friction among “in group” and “out group.” Question 3 The principle argument of Spearman and Gardner intelligence theory is over whether one single IQ or mental test can judge human intelligence. Spearman based on his observations deduced that all mental ability tests are correlated. This implies that one who scores high on IQ or mental ability tests usually would score higher on other tests (Motley, P.L, 2006). He established general intelligence theory that concludes that results of one cognitive test are correlated to other cognitive tests. Howard Gardner developed the next theory of human intelligence that is called Multiple Intelligence Theory. He pointed out that human beings have multiple, not general intelligence capability, which is reflected through the different independent parts of the brain. He classified intelligences as linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, and naturalist. Question 4 Nomothetic approach defines personality through universal laws of behavior. This approach explains that personality is largely inherited, and social influences have mere effect. Psychologists who are a follower of this approach believe that genetics and biochemistry define personality. This approach is also known as “trait” approach, which is reflected in the “Big Five” theory of personality. Predictive validity measurement defines how well a test can predict future performance. In order to study predictive validity, the researchers examined relationships among Big Five personality dimensions, cognitive ability, and training performance. They used 370 samples Marines attending Marine Corps’ recruiter training. Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness traits of big five significantly predicted performance on simulation-based training criteria (Dean, Conte, & Blankenhor, 2006). In another study (Bruin de K., Bruin de G., & Hartslief, M. ), researchers explored whether scores on intelligent and personality test can predict performance in an adult basic education and training program (ABET). The study revealed that non-verbal intelligence tests and personality inventories could be useful in the prediction performance in an ABET program. Researchers used Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Neuroticism, and Agreeableness traits of Big Five. References Age of the Sage. (n.d.). Solomon Asch experiment (1958) a study of conformity. Retrieved from http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html Asociacion Espanolade Psicoterapias Cognitivas. (n.d.). A manual for the repertory grid. Retrieved from http://www.terapiacognitiva.net/record/pag/contents.htm Baron, R. A., Byrne, D., & Branscombe, N. R. (2007). Mastering Social Psychology. Boston, MA: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon. Bruin de K., Bruin de G., & Hartslief, M. (2006). Predictive validity of general intelligence and Big Five measures for adult basic education and training outcome. Retrieved from https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10210/2867/Predictive%20validity%20of%20general%20intelligence%20&%20big%205.pdf?sequence=1 Cooper, C. (2002). Individual differences. London : Routledge. Cox Miles, C. (n.d.). The Role of Individual Psychological Differences in Social Psychology. Retrieved from http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/sup/Miles_1937.html Dean, M.A, Conte, J.M., & Blankenhorn, T.R. (2006). Personality and individual differences. Elsevier, B.V., Volume 41, Issue 7, 1229-1239. Dewey, R. (n.d.). Sherif (1936): Group Norms and Conformity. Retrieved from http://www.intropsych.com/ch15_social/sherif_1936_group_norms_and_conformity.html Enquire Within. (n.d.). Background to repertory grid. Retrieved from http://www.enquirewithin.co.nz/backgrou.htm Frostburg State University. (n.d.). Conformity and obedience. Retrieved from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/prism/bill.htm Gibbon, F., & Buunk, B. (1999). Individual differences in social comparison: Development of a scale of social comparison orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 76, No. 1, 129-142. McLeod, S. (2008). Social identity theory. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/social-identity-theory.html Motley, P.L. (2006). The Intelligence Theories of Charles Spearman and Howard Gardner. Retrieved from http://voices.yahoo.com/the-intelligence-theories-charles-spearman-and-27414.html?cat=72 Muskingam University. (n.d.). Stanley Milgram. Retrieved from http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/milgram.htm Psychology and Society. (n.d.). Conformity. Retrieved from http://www.psychologyandsociety.com/conformity.html Simply Psychology. (n.d). Obedience to authority. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/obedience.html Simmons, S., Estes Z. (2008). Individual differences in the perception of similarity and difference. Elsevier B.V. 708, 781 – 795. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. (n.d.). Personal construct theory. Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/pc-theory.html Uhlmann, E.L., Nosek, B.A. (2012). My culture made me do it: Lay theories of responsibility for automatic prejudice. Social Psychology, Vol 43(2), 2012, 108-113. doi: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000089 University of Southampton. (n.d.). Personal construct theory – George Kelly. Retrieved from http://www.pgce.soton.ac.uk/IT/Learning/Kelly/ Read More