Current Research
Humans are social beings, so they constantly work on developing their relationships with different people. This paper will describe the list of topics associated with social interactions, including group and organizational behavior, attraction, intimacy friendships, altruism, prejudice and stereotypes, aggression, and applied social psychology. Besides, it will analyze the current researches of aggression, friendships, prejudice and stereotypes. Everyone should deal with aggression, prejudice and stereotypes to establish strong friendships.
Descriptions of Topics
Group behavior is related to the ways of human conduct in groups. There are three major phenomenon associated with group behavior, such as groupthink, groupshift and deindividualization. Groupthink occurs when the group is so concentrated on some specific easy decision that it ignores other options. Groupshift is a phenomenon when individual ideas of some group members are too overemphasized. Deindividualization is when the person starts doing only what the other group members want and losses self-consciousness.
Organization behavior studies organizations from various standpoints, including conduct within the organization and behaviors with other organizations. Micro organizational behavior deals with personal and group dynamics in organizations, whereas macro organizational behavior or macro strategic management refers to whole organizations and industries. The major concepts of organizational behavior are leadership, decision making, motivation and productivity. It is the responsibility of management to control all these aspects.
Attraction is when the person is drawn to someone else. Factors causing attraction include proximity, physical attractiveness, simulairy/complementarity, relationships benefits and liking people who like us. Intimacy denotes emotional closeness to other person. When partners have intimacy in relationships, they are able to share their internal thoughts and feelings with each other. Therefore, attraction starts a relationship and degree of intimacy defines its significance.
Friendships are reciprocal relationships when both sides exchange some benefits. For example, comrades usually provide each other with emotional support and instrumental help.The person desiring making new friends needs to demonstrates prosocial behavior. This means that the individual should provide assistance or shares something with people. Besides, some people expect such benefits from their friends as status, money or power.
Altruism is helping people without any expectations. Besides, altruism does not create concerns for people, who receive help. Altruism is also a motive to improve the welfare of a person without thinking about own interests. Altruism is opposite to egoism. Unlike altruism, egoism is a motive to rise own welfare.
Prejudice is biased negative opinion about a group or some its members. Its negative consequence is that it leads to social exclusion of individuals. Moreover, a person faces isolation and discrimination during the whole lifespan. Stereotypes are beliefs about personal traits of a group of individuals. For example, there are negative and positive stereotypes about races and nationalities.
Aggression is defined as physical or verbal behaviors, which attempt to hurt someone. It can be induced because of either biological or psychological reasons. For example, one can be become offensive due to genetic, neural or biochemical influences. Biochemical factors include hormones, drugs or alcohol. Neural effects are connected with specific processes in the front lobe of the brain. Furthermore, there is a gene of aggression. With regard to psychological impacts, such conduct can be caused by undesirable situations, rejection, violent environment or other cultural and psychological influences.
Applied social psychology denotes the use of social psychological concepts, study findings and research methods to understand some social problems and create effective solutions for these issues. One of the discipline’s principles is that social issues are greatly caused by people’s conduct. Therefore, applied social psychology carefully studies how human behavior changes under different conditions.
Reviews of Articles
The research of Astrid M.G. Poorthuis and her colleagues is focused on factors leading to high-quality mutual attachment. In particular, they found that luminary personalities could have high-quality friendships even if they do not exhibit prosocial behavior. They have other attractive characteristics for the public. For instance, famous individuals are normally influential, powerful and in the center of attention. Moreover, they can help their fellow gain popularity.On the other hand, this does not mean that everyone needs to become a celebrity to have true and long-standing mates. Firstly, the group can have only a few popular people, so other members have to use alternative methods to make friends. Secondly, the participants of the research were young adolescents. In this age, individuals do value popularity. Hence, this fact probably motivates them to develop relationships with illustrious peers. When youngsters become older, their values change. Therefore, the role of fame is expected to reduce and people will start paying more attention to emotional support and similar benefits.
The article of Dominic Abrams and Melanie Killen studies the development roots of prejudice. The researchers found that the public rejection appear in the childhood. Children, who have low-quality parenting and improper access to early education are likely to experience prejudices and social exclusion. Another important factor is economic stability. Those from poor families are at greater risk of being outcasts. Over time, the issue has not disappeared because excluded kids have lower motivation to study at school, so they demonstrate worse academic and career achievements. Besides, they suffer from anxiety and depression as well as cannot develop healthy peer relationships. Unfortunately, these problems are often neglected, so when adolescents become adults, they still face the same concerns. Moreover, they might encounter even more biases. Interventions for addressing preconceptions and social isolation should depend on a range of issues. Firstly, it is necessary to determine how and why individuals and groups decide to exclude others. Secondly, developers of interventions should analyze how people feel about their castaway status and how it changes during the lifespan. Today, publicly castaway children do not receive adequate help since kids themselves are viewed as the problem and the community explains public isolation by dysfunctional social development of a person.
The article of Anna Yaros et al. is focused on the second step of Crick and Dodge’s social information-processing (SIP) model; specifically they tried to explore situational cues that can predict aggressive conduct of children. The scientists analyzed reliability of verbal and non-verbal measures of hostile attribution biases. Specific feature of the study is that it focuses on real-time adverse intentions. The scholars used video game to investigate what hostile attributions kids demonstrate while playing against their friends. The results proved that real-time hostile attributions happen fast in response to social interaction, so they might not require conscious thought. On the other hand, belligerent intents are not completely automatic. During the non-verbal response procedure, children had to choose either hostile or benign attitude. Under the verbal response procedure, individuals sometimes analyzed attributions of their peers or simply made affective statements. As a result, some youngsters demonstrated aggression because they could not deal with the pressure. The researchers also concluded that relation between reactive violence and real-time hostile attributions is fostered by the impulsive response style. Thus, those who expressed proactive aggression used more conscious thought during the response procedure.
In conclusion, the study of prejudice and stereotypes revealed that adult form of social exclusion has its roots in the childhood. The individuals from poor families with improper parenting styles and reduced access to education have more chances to encounter negative impact of prejudices. The current research of friendship revealed that kids could establish high-quality friendships by either demonstrating prosocial behavior or gaining popularity. The study of aggression found that it is helpful to use real-time hostile attributions to predict offensive deportment.
