Discovering Psychology
For many years psychologist have tried to piece apart how humans learn, evolve, and develop identities. Many theories have been observed and explained, but none can ever be perfect. For as long as the human mind has been a subject of study, psychologists who study it will always be asking certain questions, such as: do humans learn through observation or through experience? Which carries more weight, experiences in the environment, or being taught step-by-step procedures? For example, if a mother sees her child reach for a hot stove, she will probably slap the child's hand away telling him to not do that because he will be burned and it will hurt. The child then has two options: to not touch a hot stove because the mother told him not to, and the mother knows best, or to touch the hot stove and find out for himself that stove is indeed hot, and it hurts! Many psychological theories claim to possess the ability to predict which choice the child will make; either through observational learning (a mother's fear of a hot stove), or through experience (touching the hot stove; it's hot!). This author hopes to examine and assess the claim that environment plays a very important role in human behavior and performance.
Three aspects of environment will be examined and assessed with respect to human social learning, social interactions and memory retrieval. The first being the social learning theory and its role on the human environment; specifically that humans make more decisions than they are aware of based on observing others, using marital violence as an example. The second aspect will be how do social interactions affect learning; particularly children's friendships affecting their learning and achievement goals in social interactions. Lastly, this paper will look at memories and the effects that environmental factors have on memory; and in particular how "repressed" memories can be manipulated and how "leading questions" can change memories.
Social Learning & Behavior
An important part of social learning, especially for children, is what is known as "priming," which simply means that when exposed to a certain behavior, a child (or person) is more likely to react with a stored behavior (Brace & Byford 2010, p. 123). For example, when a couple fights it is always with anger and their child sees that repeatedly, then the priming mechanism states that when that child is in a relationship they are more likely to argue with anger instead of calmly discussing the disagreement. The person has no tools with which to handle the situation in a different way, so the same behaviors are repeated. Another important mechanism is called "desensitization," which if a person is exposed to the stimuli enough times, it is no longer a stimulus for that person (Brace & Byford 2010, p. 124).
An excellent example of that behavior is an article written by Robert Ciladini (2005, p. 160), in which he surmises that social influence is much stronger on the human race with respect to behavior that we give credit to. In his article, he has at least three experiments set up, but the one that is significant to this paper involves numerous not-for-profit organizations touting messages of being "greener" to save the environment, complete with pamphlets telling the public what percentage of America was doing negative acts like not recycling. In order to test the theory of significant social influence, he decides to reverse the negative effects (i.e. By telling the public about how much everyone else pollutes, the public copies that very behavior as well), by creating an experiment in a hotel to get more customers to re-use their towels. Instead of using the hotel's usual messages, he decides to create signs and pamphlets telling customer how many other guests re-use their towels too, thereby influencing them to copy that behavior, saving energy and money for the hotel. So although people may be desensitized to messages of being green and to not contribute to what everyone else does, by merely releasing the statistics of how many people do recycle and how many people do use public transit it would shift the desensitization into positive social influence.
Another example of social influence, which brings up the subject of priming again, is a far less positive case of social influence dealing with marital violence. In a study conducted by Sharon Mihalic and Delbert Elliott (1997, p. 21-47), the main hypotheses was testing the social learning theory by itself, and not including ethnicities or socio-economic status, stating that if those were influences...
Psychology is considered to be an area of study that involves behavior. Behavior is demonstrated in a lot of diverse areas in the field of psychology. Some of these examples are mental illness, relationships, sexuality, depression, family dynamics, or culture. Accepting of behavior is picked up by various techniques and it could be from society or changes in individuals or the overall population. Psychologists look at various factors such as
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