Social psychology is essentially the study of how human beings interact, behave and think around others. It is rooted in explaining the various different experiences we face each day in our social lives. Nowadays, film-makers try to depict these psychological phenomena in their movies to make them realistic. One such movie stars Emma Stone, an Oscar winner playing the role of Olive in the film “Easy A”. The film in short describes the high school life of a chaste girl, Olive, who conforms to peer pressure and starts lying about her sexual behavior in order to maintain a certain reputation as well as to help out her troubled friends. This eventually leads her to challenge her self concepts to extreme levels, causing her to either liberate herself from the façade she created or sink into the role. Easy A describes many genuine psychological phenomena and I am going to focus on three of them; Cognitive dissonance theory, how societal and cultural norms dictate our attitudes and thoughts, and different ways of persuasion. …show more content…
Easy A depicts strongly the theory of cognitive dissonance on numerous occasions. After Olive wrongfully admits to having sexual intercourse with a guy, the entire high school starts labeling her as a promiscuous woman. Since the uneasy feeling of lying about her acts causes a severe cognitive dissonance, Olive starts acting like an unchaste lady in order to overcome it. She becomes a devil-like diva who wears revealing clothes and buys provocative lingerie. She mentions casually to her best friend Rhi that losing her chastity to a guy was nothing but a fling which ended over the weekend, leaving Rhi surprised. Furthermore, she starts flirting with all
The author’s purpose is to show how easily people are influenced by society and those around them.
Compare and Contrast the approach to studying children’s friendships taken in the Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) study with that taken by William Corsaro.
I am very interested in the School Psychology program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I have a strong educational background and a number of professional and educational experiences, which I feel have prepared me for this program. I enjoy working with children and developing strong rapport with parents and co-workers. I learned about the graduate program with great interest because I would like to offer my skills in the area of psychology to meet students’ psychological needs.
This movie is a great example of social groups, leadership, culture, norms, society, nature and nurture, and social lives. This movie represents how the American culture chooses our social class in society. Some sociologists believed that lifestyle choices are an important influence on our social class position (Giddens, 209). Our class position is the way we dress, where we eat, where we sleep, and how we relax (Giddens,
The movie, The Butler (2013), by Lee Daniels, proves a vivid image of how an African American family (the Gaines) handle and identify with the historical struggles of the civil rights movements. The main characters are Cecil Gaines, Louis Gaines, and Charlie Gaines and all three men were victims of violence, unequal rights, and limit resources. Cecil is the father of the family who tries to provide better opportunities for his family by being a servant (house nigger) to a butler at the White House. He was a butler for eight presidential administrations and became blind to the harsh reality of segregation. Louis Gaines was the eldest son who decide to attend the Fisk University to be civil rights activist
Certain films evoke an emotion in you. Whether it being happy, sad, scared or even angry – movies have a way of teaching us new things about ourselves and even the world. I, myself, often find myself trying to piece together what types of roles individuals play within society, regardless of if it is a film or real life. We all have these roles and functions that determine how we will act, what we will do, how we will react, and who we will interact with. These are all things that we want to know about someone, not only out of curiosity but so we can predict how others that do the same will also react. The movie, Divergent, which is based on the three-novel series by Veronica Roth is one that showed me how society functions from a
(DeLamater, 287) This is shown in the movie when at first she is pressured and says she had sex with someone because her friend did and once she got that reputation the guys persuaded her to act like she was being promiscuous and having sexual relations with them. Even though she knew this was wrong she still decided to do it because the majority influence put more pressure on her to go with “having sexual relations” to help some of her friends (who were guys) become more popular. This resulted in cognitive dissonance, which is a theory, that deals with consistency between behaviors and attitudes and it occurs after a decision and when one acts inconsistent with their beliefs. (DeLamater, 153) This is shown when she makes the decision to lie to her friend and say she has had sex and afterwards she has second thoughts and starts to regret it because it went against her values that she held.
In life people will come in contact with others, who are from a different background, culture, lifestyle or ethnicity as them, yet still every individual is equal, they’re all humans. As humans, people have the tendency to have their own unique perspectives on the world around them and everything it encounters. Psychologist Gordon Allport (1985), one of the founding fathers of personality psychology, defined social psychology as a discipline in which scientific methods are used in order “to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings” (Cherry).Social psychology involves
Judgment can be the the greatest plague of society. Judgment kripples acceptance, forward growth and blinds entire communities. Though in retrospect plagues are necessary, as is judgment. Without judgment humanity would be blind to people's character exposing them dangerous risks unstable people present. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne , Hester dealt with the judgment repercussions of adultery. Her sin caused society's judgment of her to rise and fall, in tandem producing negative and positive effects for Hester. Throughout the novel the Puritan community shifts their views of Hester. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, judgment that plagued Hester as a result of her sin evolved and shifted the communities views of her.
The principles and theories of Social Psychology are important and useful in assessing behaviors in situations. These social psychological principles and their applications can be seen in fictional films which can also be attributed to everyday life. One such film that holds certain social psychological perspectives is Will Gluck’s 2010 production of Easy A. A film about high school student Olive Penderghast and how a sudden change in popularity and financial status, after an unintentional rumor about how she supposedly lost her virginity to a college guy spread through the entire her school. The film draws on the behavioral connections of pronounced hussy Olive Penderghast and her English class’s assigned reading of The Scarlet Letter.
The concern about life is a main human characteristic. No matter if his concern is concentrated in himself or in persons or things that surround him and constitute his environment, everybody wants to know why people, himself included, behave the way they behave. Everybody, also, wants to improve his behavior, so as to live in harmony with himself and the society.
In Psychology 101, you learn about a personal fable; something that I have not lost. I have always wanted to change the world that I was destined for greatness and teaching elementary school students gives me that power. In the words of Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Chapter 12 social psychology cover how we affect one another’s behaviors. Culture, stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination attitude, and interpersonal attraction are all factors that contribute to behavior in a social setting. Understanding how we influence one another on a social level forces us to look at not only ourselves, but also look at how others affect the world we live in and why it is important to be able to identify these influences and the impact they have on our behaviors good or bad
When I started this class this pass September I had a little knowledge of psychology. In my junior year of high school I took Psychology as an elective class. I really enjoy it alot, it amaze me how much there was to know about our brains. This September I came with the feeling that this psychology class was going to be way different from my psychology class from high school. And that my knowledge from my class before wasn’t going to be useful at all. But I was wrong, this class has actually been better than my other class. Because it has help dust off some of the concepted that I had learn before. But it has also made gain more knowledge about psychology that I didn’t knew before. For example the next concepts are the ones that had impacted me the most: critical thinking and the eight essential, implicit learning, short term and long term memories. I chose these concept because they have not only taught me more about psychology, but they have made a big impact on me.
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, of information in the brain. It is a process that is generalized within a species, and relates to members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the methods of cognitive