Self And Social Psychology

I guess the easiest thing that we have learned since we arrive in this world is interacting with other people. As we grow and develop, we get to see and interact with different types of people and we try to understand them through social psychology. We understand why people act the way they do and why some judge others and social psychology made us understand why we tend to decide with others and g with their judgment rather than have our own minds about the matter. Social psychology introduces as to our self and to our group or the people we belong with.

We tend to try to understand our self and how we are as a person then we try to act and behave accordingly as to whom we are and this concept is called self-concept. This is our idea of which we are our understanding of our self (Mcleod, 2008). This composes of our belief about our self, our attitude and behavior and our opinion as how we are supposed to behave and how we really behave (Feenstra, 2011). As for me, my self-concept is that I am a worrier and I said this because I always end up telling other people about my worries so I share it with them. This is very different with my friend who always keeps her taught to herself and stays aloof all the time. Then aside from our self-concept, we also have what we call our self-schema. Self-schema is the way we look at ourselves hence it can be associated with what we liked to do. My self-schema is that I am a gardener because I love working on my garden. Every time I see something about gardening, I can easily associate myself with it because of my self-schema hence my behavior shows how I perceive myself. Self-schema is the same as self-awareness hence I am aware of myself either publicly or privately. Private self-awareness ar...

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... common among social psychologist like what happened when someone conducted a research called The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The patients in this study were not treated with the disease. The reason why they were selected for the study is to find out the outcome of having Syphilis and not find a cure for it. The research was deemed unethical because the patients were at risk not knowing that they are indeed suffering from Syphilis. They don’t know the symptoms, the cure or the medicine that they should take and it shows that they were rob of the opportunity to get well because the said fact was hidden from them. If there would be another research to be done regardless of the topic, it might be impossible to get participants because of fear that such unethical behavior from researchers might happen again putting everyone’s lives at risk.