MOOC "Social psychology". Module 3.

This week we need to pass the 3d module of our course. I enjoyed watching all the videos and getting new knowledge.

In the 1st lecture the author talks about the way how we can predict people's behavior using the information about them. Besides, I learnt about different views on the main values. There is a classical model of 10 important values of a society. They are subdivided into 4 groups: values of changing, values of safety, values of self-affirmation, values of self-overcoming can differ from each other.

The 2nd lecture was about social beliefs. They are one's ideas about our society, perception of the world. Thus, according to the studies of Michelle Bond, Kwok Leung there are 5 types of social axioms such as social synicism, social complexity, reward for efforts, religiosity, destiny control. There are also other beliefs apart from the conception described above:

·                     the faith in the fair world (everyone deserves all their failures, grief along with their successes, achievements). 

·                    the faith in the dangerous world (anything bad can happen)

·                    the faith in the competitive world (everyone is your rival, you should fight with them

In the 3d lecture there was some information about attitudes, their structures and functions. The attitude is a positive or a negative evaluation of a person. Attitudes play a very important role in our life, perform the following functions:

·                    cognitive

·                    defending our egoes

·                    instrumental (acquirement of social approval)

·                    the function of self-expression

Attitudes can differ from each other according to different criteria: 

·                    subjective importance

·                    stability

·                    accessibilty

·                    homogeneity

·                    extremality

Also I got to know about 2 types of attitudes: 

1.                explicit (they are well controlled and we are concsious about them)

2.                implicit (no control)

In the 4th lecture the professor told about the influence of attitudes to one's behavior. They do not always determine and express real behavior of people. However, they make an impact on the way how people act and behave if a person is interested in solving the problem. It makes one to want to change his decisions. Also another important factor is the strength and correspondence to behavior of an attitude itself. Besides, a lot depends on the situation. A person will act in accordance with his attitudes if he has a lot of free time and an accurate plan of action. I think it is true because, personally, I can be more productive if I have a certain plan, also I need particular circumstances to work hard. I found the theory of planned behavior very interesting. This theory suggests that our behavior depends from our intentions and also from other three factors as attitudes, acceptance of our actions by other people and control of our actions. The lecturer described the theory by bringing an example with jogging. Indeed if we want to change ourselves for the better we have to try hard, but the success depends on those factors. However, I believe that a strong will can impact on our strong determination to work on becoming a better version of ourselves too. Intentions are considered to be “strong” if they are specific, stable, definite, homogeneous and recent.

In the 5^th lecture the professor kept talking about the impact of attitudes on our conduct. I liked the information about cognitive dissonance. There are different strategies of reduction of cognitive dissonance:

·        changing of one’s behavior

·        no feeling of responsibility

·        changing of a cognition

·        reassessment of a cognition

·        adding a new cognition

·        looking for support

The 6^th lecture was devoted to the topic of cognitive dissonance as well. Olga Gulevich told about different effects that were caused by this psychological phenomenon. The effect of insufficient justification means that people tend to lie when they were not satisfied by something they did to make themselves feel not so badly about what they did. The effect of insufficient prohibition means that the more something is prohibited the more there will be violations of certain rules. The effect of reassessment of alternatives means that a person overestimates the importance of one thing when he chooses it from a wide range of variety of pretty similar things. The effect of justification of efforts means that the more effort an individual puts into some activity the higher he evaluates the result of his work. The effect of justification of violence means that partners can explain their anger towards each other by giving a low evaluation of each other.

             In the 7^th lecture I learnt about self-perception. The effect of superior motivation happens when people lose their inner motivation to do something when they are offered some material reward.  Moreover, there is another effect that means that one agrees to do the task that seems to him easier than a harder one.

Here is the result how I did the test:

Personally, I suppose that the information given is becoming more and more complex. That is difficult, but anyway I liked the third module. What about you? What are your thoughts about it? Was it hard for you to pass the test? Leave comments down below!