SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND DESIGN

THE ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL

FOUNDATION IN NATURAL BUILD ENVIRONMENT

NAME: PRESTON LIEW RU PING

STUDENT ID NO: 0313822

SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGY (PSYC0103)

LECTURER: Ms CHIA YEE PANG

ASSIGNMENT: JOURNAL/PERSONAL REFELCTION 2

Social Psycology Journal 1

For this lecture, it brings up the topic of Conformity and Group Behaviour.

The class started with a small experiment which includes my course mate, Kelvin. Before

the class started, he went to the restroom without knowing what will happen next. The lecturer

asked every single student in the room to participate and say the answer is B no matter what. So

as Kelvin returns from the restroom, the lecturer begins the lecture by showing us 4 bars and

asked us to determine which bar has the same length. Everyone answered B, which was the

wrong answer and then Kelvin was the only one who answered the correct answer. But while

everyone was saying the answer is B, Kelvin remained persistent and stayed with his answer,

even though the lecturer said the answer is B.

From the slides, conformity is a type of social influence which people tend to fit into a

group of people. Conformity has 2 types of responses which is physical presence or group

presence. And then, there were experiments that shown people tend to follow the actions of the

majority instead of doing it on their own.

Besides that, we were shown a video on how a “kidnapping” happens, and people on the

streets just walks past the girl as she was getting kidnapped and this scene had to be redone a lot

of times until there was someone willing to help the girl. It was definitely not a good sight to see

as the people there are conformed towards the other passer-by. They thought that the person

behind them or near to them would help the little girl.

Social Psycology Journal 2

For this lecture, the topic Powers and Perils of Intuition was brought up.

Our mind is somewhat like a machine, but it’s half controlled and half automatic. Our

behaviours can be in intentional voluntary cognition (controlled thinking) form or less controlled

automatic cognition (automatic thinking).

From the slides, controlled thinking is considered to be reflective, deliberate and

conscious. We will know what we’re doing and it will be intentional. Our mind can think

rationally compared to automatic thinking.

Automatic thinking is impulsive, effortless and unconscious. For example, anger,

depression and sadness may cause a person to do something very spontaneous. A real case

scenario would be as followed: Jimmy’s girlfriend cheated on him with another guy. Jimmy is

very depressed, and as that depression accumulates, Jimmy may feel like slitting his own wrist

due to the uncontrolled thinking or worst case scenario – suicide.

Humans are very sensitive creatures towards the emotional side. We tend to get very

emotionally involve in a lot of situations before we even have time to think. It may also come

from the closeness between the relationships of us with our surrounding people.