FNBE0413 CHEAH TECK WEI 0315215 PSYC0103

17 th December 2013

Today's lecture is about "attractiveness and close relationships". The outline of this

lecture is what causes attraction, close relationships, love and relationships and ending

intimate relationships. Throughout the lecture I have learnt the facts that can bring people

together. Firstly, proximity is the key. Proximity is the distance between people such as do

they live or work close to each other? There's an experiment that actually proven this, the

experiment of domity. The experiment shows that how easy that people from different room

get together in the different floor. It is really a quite an interesting experiment. Based on my

own experience, people from same school, university tend to get together easier compared to

people from different school because they can meet each other often and have more

interactions. This also involves the fact "Familiarity". Familiarity is the repeated exposure to

an object results in greater attraction to that object, in simple, we tend to be friends with

someone which is from the same secondary school as us when we are in the same university

although we don't know each other before that. The last fact is the "Similarity". Similarity is

the common thing we have in each other. For example, my friend, Jason and I, has a common

hobby that brings us together which is playing computer game. The similarity can be hobby,

attitude and taught. People who have a similarity in attitude also tend to be together as they

think that people that are similar to them will like them too.

Three of these facts really gave me a strike on my mind that explains the things

which is happening in my daily life such as friends starting a relationship, breaking up and so

on. It was a great lesson the learnt and I am sure it will be useful for the future of my life.

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FNBE0413 CHEAH TECK WEI 0315215 PSYC0103

10 th December 2013

In social psychology, we learn about things happening around us. Today, we had

learnt about conformity and group behaviour. Understanding conformity is easy by carrying

out an experiment from Soloman Asch. The experiment is showing a line comparing with

three lines with different length and one of it is obviously correct, then the whole class would

be told that telling that one of the wrong answer is correct instead of the correct one when

someone go out from the class. So the experiment starts, the people comes in and Ms. Pang

starts asking which was the correct answer, everyone but that particular person which don’t

know the plan answers the wrong one. He started feeling weird and wondering but he still

thinks that his answer was right. But then later other classmates tells him that he’s wrong, he

started to doubt and finally he chooses the wrong one even he think it’s wrong. Hence,

conformity is yielding to others which is when most of the people do something even it was

wrong, some individual would follow even they think they’re wrong to join the group, it’s

somehow like peer pressure for example when everyone has a phone, you tend to have a

phone too.

Besides conformity, group behaviour is another main topic in this lecture. As in our

course, group assignments were common and we always have to form groups to complete

different assignments. In a group of few people, works can be done faster and also slower

sometimes because of various reasons. In this topic, I had learnt the behaviour in group that

influences the others such as “the Bystander effect”, “group productivity and group size” and

“Social loading – reduction of effort”. The Bystander effect was the effect when people are

less likely to help when they are in groups than when alone. This behaviour could lead to

reduction of efficiency as it took more time for a work to be done. Other than that, group

productivity and group size could also lead to reduction in efficiency caused by lack of

coordination. Lastly, when there were more people, some people would blend to the crowd

and do nothing in ease as well as reducing work effort. All of these problems could actually

solved by choosing proper member with good personalities such as hardworking and

choosing a right person which has a good leadership. In addition, grouping also has some

benefits such as increasing in productivity, solving complicated logic problem faster and also

completing work faster.

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FNBE0413 CHEAH TECK WEI 0315215 PSYC0103

In this topic, I had understood the reasons that may reduce the productivity of a group

and how to solve it. It was really useful as I may go through many assignment in groups with

different peoples.

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