Psychology 1
PREVIOUS: Triology of the Mind
The realm of social psychology and personality psychology includes the way that we interact with our environment and how our environment acts upon us.
Traditional Personality Psychology: These old farts believed that your behavior is dependent solely on your personality–your traits, attitudes, beliefs, moods, motives, values. B = f(P). Traditional Social Psychology: These guys thought that your behavior is dependent solely on your environment. B = f(E).
Later on, psychologists began speculating that behavior was a function of both of these factors. B = f(P, E) = f(P) + f(E). Later later on, we see that all three affect each other in this complex triangle.
The Big Five of Personality: OCEAN: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. But how strong are these traits? Weak doctrine of traits, known as the biosocial view, traits summarize and can predict the behaviors of an individual. On the other hand, the strong doctrine of traits states that traits are the cause of our behaviors. These traits are used to describe and to predict behavior and attitude. Obviously, with the right environment and factors, a very introverted person could be the center of the dance circle–which is how we know that our behavior is affected by BOTH our personality and our environment.
Personality Psychology
As described above, our personality affects our behavior. One thing we notice from our personality is the foot in the door effect. A guy walks up to you on Sproul and asks you to take this survey. You take the survey and then he invites you to go to his event which is happening later. You are more likely to say yes now.
The James Lange Theory of Emotion brings in our emotions into our behavior. Traditionally, it stated that our emotions elicit a behavior. Revised thinkers reverse the causality and say that our behaviors elicit our emotions. I feel sad so I cry vs I cry so I am sad. This illustrates the effect of behavior on a person.
Social Psychology
Our environment impacts our behavior as well. In a group, setting, the more people there are, we tend to conform to what others say or are doing–clapping, cheering, etc, which also creates things like the bystander effect.