Chapter !5

While listening to the presentation on chapter 15 I thought of a great example of normative social influence and how people will conform within groups for school projects.


I am a Social Work major,  which i quickly learned meant I would be apart of a group most of the time. For my final project I was in a group of six people that some how turned into nine people about a week before the final presentation was to be done. Naturally with nine people in a group there was not very much work to be divided. Two females within the group felt that the two males in the group were not contributing anything. What end up happening was 6 females in the group had a meeting discussing the two men. They came into the room and asked me to come into the hall and told me they did not want to put their names on the final project. I knew they expected me to agree because everyone else went along with this plan( normative social influence) , but naturally with my personality I disagreed and told them to say all of this to their face instead of having powwows in the hallway. Since I knew they were not going to say anything I decided to go in the room and be honest with the two males and give them some work to do. Even though  I knew this would make most of the group not very fond of me because I didnt conform,  I felt like this would not be the mature thing to do. I later found out that the other 4 girls did not agree with how the two group members were treated they just didn't want to speak up because they wanted to avoid any conflict.

Chapter 6

Up until high school I never actually realized that in art things look further away because objects are placed at the top of the page.One day my art teacher asked us how would we take two mountains that are the same size in a picture and make one appear farther away than the other.The answer was to put one of the mountains up higher at the top of the paper. Also, because one mountain is perceived as closer it can also be perceived as larger. This is how I first leaned about relative height and size. 

I was watching the movie Hall Pass and I saw an example of contexts effects. Well in the movie the three men were in the club looking for women to possibly take home with them. while scoping out women they saw what seemed to be a tall, beautiful, blonde female. One of the men intervened and said if you put your hands up and block out the other females around her you can see how she really looks. When they tried this method  she quickly turned very unattractive. This goes along with the saying that if a average female walks in with a group of unattractive girls she will start to look pretty.

Chapter !4

Aversive conditioning is the use of a noxious stimuli paired with a bad or unwanted behavior in order to stop the unwanted behavior. 


When I was younger I had a problem with sucking my thumb. I had a babysitter that decided to use aversive conditioning to abolish this unwanted behavior. On the first try my babysitter would put lemon juice on my thumb( the noxious stimuli)  so that when I sucked my thumb I would be turned off by the taste. Unfortunately for her this plan did not work because I happened to like the taste of lemon juice. So she decided to go a different route and use Tabasco sauce as the noxious stimuli. This time it worked, after a couple of attempts to suck my thumb I soon learned that sucking my thumb meant a very nasty taste. Though this may not be as drastic as using a drug on alcohols to make them sick, it can be a lesser example of aversive conditioning.

Chapter !3

While I was listening to the presentation I started to think about how my friends have incorrectly labelled  some of the things I do as OCD. For example, when I get a sandwich I dont like anything hanging over or going pass the edged of the bread. My solution is to take a knife and cut of the excess food. I do this just because I like for my food to look presentable if I am paying for it, not because of any fears.  Another example would be how often i clean the bathroom and how much effort i put into cleaning. But my philosophy and reasoning for it is how am i supposed get to clean in something dirty. Clearly these can be seen as compulsive behaviors. My question is, can you have OCD without being obsessive and just compulsive?

Chapter 12

When I ask my family members how was my personality as a child I usually get two answers. My mothers side of the family would say I was talkative and outgoing with a easy temperament. My fathers side of the family would explain me as an introvert, never smiled, never talked and would occasionally curse at people when I was mad. These two very different descriptions made me realize how environment does contribute to personality or at least to you showing certain traits of your personality in certain situations. I guess in my case I have a Behavior/Trait perspective on how personalities work.

Chapter 8

   The first people I think about when discussing memory is my grandmother and nephew. I think is amazing to see how fast my nephew can catch on to everything and remember every word I say, which means I can no longer swear around him. However on the other hand I have my grandmother whom I constantly have to repeat everything to because her mind is doing the opposite, and she is increasingly finding it harder to recall information previously stored. 

This leads me to thinking about encoding and how my previous teacher Uncle Bejon would help us store information by using elaborative encoding; talking about a theory and then relating it to something funny or traumatic that had occurred during his life. So instead of just using rehearsal to help store and remember the information we had a way to reflect back on something significant.