Social Psychology: Bringing It All Together Essay

The first side that gets addressed is the Confederate side. While there are many different reasons that the soldiers fought in this civil war, the one of the main causes was for the use of slavery. Many soldiers had the mindset to fight for “a free white man’s government instead of living under a black republican government” (53). This will to uphold the racial inequality was seen in the way the South fought with passion and hatred against the change of their lives (19). Confederate soldiers were mostly bought into the war, due to the plantation owners sending someone else in their names. Soldiers

The romanticized version of the Civil War creates a picture of the North versus the South with the North imposing on the South. However, after reading “The Making of a Confederate” by William L. Barney, one can see that subdivisions existed before the war was declared. The documents analyzed by Barney primarily focus on the experiences of Walter Lenoir, a southern confederate and a member of the planter elite. His experiences tell a vivid story of a passionate and strongly opinioned participant of the Civil War as well as demonstrate a noticeably different view involving his reasoning when choosing a side. Between analyzing this fantastic piece of literature and other resourceful documents from “Voices of Freedom” by Eric Foner, one

Personal variables do contribute to interpersonal communiation behaviors. I believe the personal variables I say in this

Through examining the letters of a Confederate surgeon, the main motivation for Southerners to both fight and continue fighting in the American Civil War was hope. From the inception of the war, the South had major disadvantages compared to the North in almost every aspect of war; however, Confederates had remarkable confidence in the face of such weaknesses. The Union did have similar sureness in themselves, but the Confederacy displayed noteworthy hope throughout the entire war that was not expected under their circumstances. The Confederacy was outnumbered in men, weapons, food production, transportation, and so on, yet they had hope until the end. Each Southerner had faith that compelled them to fight in the war, but each Southerner had faith in different places. Confederates held onto different sources of hope – hope that the Union would quit, hope that the Confederacy would prevail, hope that they would return to their homes – but hope nonetheless was what drove Southerners in the war.

If the north was to succeed, they would forever be oppressed by their victory, and slaves of their achievements. The Confederates fought to promote the wellbeing of their family and the protection of their land “from Yankee outrage and atrocity”(Mc.Pherson 20) .

1 Historians assess numerous reasons in assessing North’s success over the South in the Civil War. North was more developed and industrialized like factories and workshops, had definite edge in manpower of military age males, transportation, railroads and resources. Some historians blame on weak southern economic demographics and psychological reasons for the confederate defeat. “The south “whipped itself” because it did not believe strongly in its cause... While the North could allegedly call on the full fervor of American nationalism and antislavery idealism, the south was saddled with the morally dubious enterprise of defending slavery and was engaged in breaking up a union of hallowed origin for which many southerners still had a lingering reverence. It has even been suggested that large numbers of loyal confederates had a subconscious desire to lose the war”. (Source-1) North’s victory is due or ascribed to its better cause and morale.

decisions. Personal and societal factors are highly related. Choices affect social structure and vice versa.

Confederates enter the war with a belief that would also sustain them during war years and ultimately shape the south after the war, a durable belief in their invincibility. Even after major turning points of the war, diehard Rebels continued to express a resilient belief in their invincibility. They were unconquerable and they truly stuck it about because they expected to win. Their ethos; beliefs of being highly favored children of God, attitudes of invincibility (homegrown and those spread through propaganda), patriotism, masculinity, and veteran comradery - on many different levels help to shape the war and the New South.

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

Secondly, The Behavioural Theory, based on Ivan Pavlov’s 1879 Classic Conditioning experiment and largely influenced by B.F. Skinner’s 1948 Operant Behaviourism Theory suggests that individual’s behaviour is

As people, we often presume that the actions displayed by a person are piloted through their individual thoughts and opinions, however, the cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) shows that this is not always the case. Labeled by some as an action-opinion theory, the theory of cognitive dissonance explains how people are compelled to commit actions contrary to their beliefs. The basic principle behind action-opinion theories is that these

Social interactions, cognitive processes, environmental variables, cultural context, and biological factors shape what social psychology is all about and how it is practiced in that social psychologists are mostly interested in an individual with emphasis on all the things that make an individual who they are and why they act and think the way that they do socially (Baron, Branscombe, & Bryne, 2008).

The Theory of Planned Behavior was designed to analyze the link between attitudes and behavior and help to predict and explain human behavior. The thought behind the theory is that it will help to understand how we can change people’s behavior. The theory is based on three defining factors about beliefs. The three types include normative beliefs, behavioral and control beliefs. Behavioral beliefs are described as the attitude that she hold towards the behavior, while

There are many explanations for the origins of modern social psychology. It is therefore important to consider that social psychology cannot be traced back to one single source of origin (Burr, 2003). Hence, this is the reason why there are debates of what social psychology is. Allport (1985) described social psychology as the study an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours which are influenced by the actual, imagines, or implied presence of others. As seen from this definition there is a direct link between social science and the individual psychology (Sewell, 1989). Social psychology cannot be seen as a linear phenomenon. This is because social psychology has been derived from a combination of influences. The development of

What judgments do we make about others? Everyday we make judgments in our social interactions about why others act the way they do, which is known as