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SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND DESIGN
FOUNDATION IN NATURAL AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT
NAME ： ERICA CHINCHING
ID NO. : 0320460
GROUP SESSION : FNBE 0814, MONDAY2-4PM
SUBJECT : SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY(PSY30203)
ASSIGNMENT : INDIVIDUAL JOURNAL
LECTURER : MR. SHANKAR
SUBMISSIONDATE : 27TH
APRIL 2015

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Entry 1 : Social cultural and Social Learning Perspective
Social cultural perspective focuses on the relationship between social behavior and
culture. Social learning perspective is a perspective argues that individuals learn from observing
the behaviors of others.
Social cultural perspective is like Asians addressing their parent “mom” and “dad” as for
the Westerners, they would address their parent by calling names. In Asian culture, it was
considered impolite to address their parent by names but in Western culture calling parent’s
name is to allow their relationship to be closer. Growing up as a Roman Catholic, I was taught
that having sexual intercourse before marriage is a wrongdoing. So, I do believe that having a
sexual intercourse before marriage is a sin and it’s wrong. However, in some countries, they have
sexual intercourse before marriage to show their love to each other or merely just to fulfill their
desire. From these two situations, we can observe that my religion and the other countries have
different social cultural perspective.
The most common social learning perspective is when children observe and learn from
the behaviors of their parents. The reinforcement of social learning could be positive and
negative. The example of positive reinforcement is that when the parents respect the elders, the
children would be more likely to respect the others as they grew up. Other than that, negative
reinforcement is such that when parent use foul language towards others and then the children
would be more likely to use foul language and disrespect towards others as they grew up. The
children learn from whatever visual from the parent’s action. As I mentioned above, I’m a
Roman Catholic. Since young, my parents always taught us to pray, brought us to church on
weekends and sent us to Sunday school. In order to set a good example to us, every night we’ll

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have a prayer before going to bed. As we grew up in a surrounding like this, we too pray every
night even without parents around.

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Entry 2 : Counterfactual Thinking
Counterfactual thinking is how a person imagines a different outcome for an event that
has already occurred. The event is normally a negative outcome and can be used to improve or
worsen a person’s mood. Counterfactual thinking can be classified into two parts. Upward
counterfactuals are considered how their predicament could have been better. Downward
counterfactuals are how they realized the consequences might be more undesirable.
I’ve always been a stubborn person. I would make a decision without listen to what my
parents told me to. When I was 14 years old, my parents told me not to join the school band.
They said it would be too busy for me to handle it. I didn’t listen to them and joined the band. Of
course, I regretted to join the band because it was really hectic as we had to go practice every
weekend and I had no time to study. Eventually, I performed badly in the examination. I thought
if only I listened to my parents I would have more time to study for my examination. Other than
that, there’s this one time I joined a club that needed a large amount of money for registration. I
did not tell my parents about the money I used for. Then, I was really regretted to use those
money without telling them. If only I told them, I would be much more at ease and peace to
myself (without lying to them).
Besides, I had the experience on the downward counterfactuals too. I am lazy when it
comes to study but I’ve always been top in the class. When I got B in a subject, I would think
that “at least I got grade B and not grade C!”.

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Entry 3 : The Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is also known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. We can actually cause
beliefs about us to become true by behaving in a manner consistent with those beliefs.
On the first day of the university, we had our orientation. We met new friends during the
orientation week. From the orientation, we would know who is more suitable to be our friends
through the first impression we had on them. The first impression could be positive or negative.
The person with a negative impression when we hear bad news from others, the negative
impression was confirmed. This is what we called confirmation bias.

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Entry 4 : Persuasive Messages
There were two routes to persuasion the central route and peripheral route. Central route
is attending to and evaluating a given message. Peripheral route is attending to external cues.
I heard this experience from a friend, Ernest. There’s this one friend named Ryan who he
trusted very much. Ryan worked as representative of a company named, QUST and wanted to
bring Ernest to a business presentation at the company. Ryan kept on persuading that the
business presentation was a fun event. So, Ernest decided to go with Ryan. After the event, Ryan
told Ernest that he too bought the products and the product is good. Ernest was impressed by the
presentation. After he heard the good reviews from Ryan, he decided to buy some products from
the company. From this situation, we can say that Ryan successfully persuaded Ernest to buy the
products by using peripheral route persuasion.

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Entry 5 : Stereotype, Prejudice and Discrimination
Stereotype is a general belief about a group of people. Prejudice is a negative learnt
attitude towards a group of people. Discrimination is a negative behaviors directed towards a
specific group of people.
The European often believes that we, Asian are good in Mathematics and very
conservative. This is how they stereotyping us as Asian. However, not every Asians are good in
Mathematics and conservative. Quite a number of Asians are not as conservative as they thought.
Besides that, we often stereotype those anime cosplayers(costume player) as “weird” or an
outcast. However, I do know a friend who is a cosplayer. She’s perfectly normal; she’s neither
wearing weird wigs in class nor using weird voices to talk. A person with different interest
doesn’t mean that they’re weird. They too, are human and need not a negative perception from
the community.
In our country, there are a lot of races. Discrimination between races is unavoidable.
From my experience in the National Service (NS), we were divided into a few groups. Every
group has different races. In the group, there would be divided into sub group of different races.
They would more preferable to mix around with the group with the same race. Some of them
would even acts negatively towards to the different races. Racism can be applied in /this situation.