Social Psychology

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Public Safety Officials have been battling the difficult question of profiling for quite a while. The question is how do they know the suspected individual fit the category associated with an offense? While it has been proven that many profiling cases are somewhat directed to a racial profile, it can be proven that people, given the discretion, are able to identify explanations for a series of behavioral events by identifying what that behavior accredits to. This theory, identified by Frite Heider, “suggested that we have a tendency to give casual explanations for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition,” called the attribution theory. Until recently, a study of the like was considered to be a branch of sociology and not a form of psychology. Social psychology essentially became the focus on the individual rather than the group as a whole. Many thoughtful ideas are collected in response to the studies of social psychology. Human cognition is understood to arise from interacting socially; highlighting the importance of socialization. We use social cognition to develop our explanations and our ideas on why a person’s behavior is/does what it is/does. As explained in class, we may have a student who never completes assignments and from that viewpoint, we determined that the student is a lazy person and more than likely does not care about the class. There exist that single chance of being correct on the inference of the students life; however, it so happened to turn out the student loves the discussions in the classroom but is struggling to find a balance between school, home, and work. The student may have collapsed in the wake of anxiety as soon as they sat down to begin a paper f... ... middle of paper ... ...lpful in the criminal justice system. References Cherry, K. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/b/2012/06/15/social-cognition-psychology-definition-of-the-week.htm Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley. McLeod, S. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html Myers, D. G. (2011). Exploring psychology. New York, NY: Worth Publishers. Myers, D. G. (2011). Exploring psychology. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.Walker, S., & Katz, C. M. (2013). The police in America: An introduction. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Wistrich, R. S. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/himmler.html Zimbardo, P.G. (2004, May, 25). Journalist interview re: Abu Ghraib prison abuses: Eleven answers to eleven questions. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford Univesity.

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