The Social Psychology Network Assignment

The Social Psychology Network

Michael Mendez

     The Social Psychology Network is an educational group with thousands of members worldwide. This site offers a platform for a multitude of psychological and theoretical perspectives, ground-breaking research, and a diverse, and interactive library, an expansive search engine and also provides a learning platform for over 1,000 psychologists from over 30 different countries. Members receive their own personal secure profile in which to network with other professionals in the field and allows them to share their research, conduct online experiments and publish resources that students can use through their academic careers to study the vast and diverse fields of psychology. Furthermore, there are several educational branches off the site such as the Jigsaw Classroom. This is an interactive, highly structured tool that assists students in taking the initiative in their learning experience. Students are encouraged to become a valuable resource of knowledge on diverse subjects in the classroom. The network is also a major contributor to numerous charitable foundations, research organizations, and institutes for the research on various psychological disorders and cancer research.

     The Social Psychology Network is founded on the premises and perspectives of the study of social psychology. Social psychology can be defined as the study of how an individual’s situations influence his or her behavior, emotions, thoughts, etc., with specific focus on how individuals perceive and how these perceptions affect others. Furthermore, social psychology primarily focuses on social influence, and social thinking. Social relations refers to certain attributes such as aggression, helping others, prejudice, and attraction and intimacy. Social influence comprises factors such as pressure to conform, biology and culture, groups of people, and persuasion.

     Social psychology is often mistaken for sociology when in fact the two disciplines vastly differ; to understand the theoretical feasibilities of social psychology, it is important to explain these differences. Social psychology endeavors to comprehend how an individual’s behavior, thoughts, and feelings are influenced by the presence of other people. There are several branches within psychology that focus on the individual; however, social psychology is different in many ways. General psychology studies a vast range of topics including research methods, nature versus nurture, motivation, psychological disorders, personality, development, language, therapy, and memory and learning. People have been curious since the beginning of civilization and this curiosity has driven us to learn from and to understand the world around us. In order to fully understand our world, it was necessary for people to develop a method of study to explain what they experienced through the application of evaluation and analysis.     

     Within the field of social psychology there are five key theoretical perspectives within the main discipline. These include evolutionary perspective, socio-cultural perspective, social-learning perspective, phenomenological perspective and social cognition perspective. These perspectives form the framework on which social psychology is built. Each component in its own right, helps us to understand all of the aspects of the world around us and how each of us interprets life experiences in different ways. How we perceive life experiences as individuals and as a members of diverse cultures is an integral part of how we think, act, feel and perceive. The first perspective is evolutionary psychology. This concepts says that social behaviors are developed through genetics and inheritance. It also emphasizes the role of biology and gene transmission across relatives to explain human behaviors. John Bowlby is known as the main contributor to the evolutionary perspective. This theory on the basis of importance in the maternal care. Bowlby thought he could combine these two to construct an idea with a big theory based on evolutionary perspective. Attachment behavior in infants and animals has been made stronger, has been endured and evolved because it helps them survive. The theory entails of different parts and promotes survival of the infants/animals in several ways which are: (1) Safety: By forming an attachment it means that there is a desire to gain and maintain proximity and this ensures safety for the infant. Both infant and the caregiver experiences feelings of anxiety when separated and this creates a proximity-seeking drive for both (have the desire of being too next to this person), (2) Emotional relationships: oh having a strong attachment to someone as an infant means they develop the skills to be able to produce healthy, stable and being able to conduct emotional relationships in future. Bowlby used the ideas of the internal working model – of having a conscious or /and unconscious rules and expect ions towards other to see how these relationships work and how it happens. This model develops after the first attachment has been made; the idea of this is that the model works like a schema/template that is used for the rest of the life to from new attachments with other people and (3) A secure base for exploration: this suggests that a securely attached child will explore a room if given time but will use the mother as a safe base, so over a certain amount of time the infant or a child will run back to the mum to seek proximity and safety. An insecurely attached child will be less likely to wonder round the room (Sutcliffe, Dunbar, Binder & Arrow, 2012).