Section A [30 marks]

Answer ALL of the following five questions. All questions carry 6 marks each.

1. The consequences of social comparison for the self depends on who the person
compares to. Illustrate with the help of two examples.

Social comparison theory is that individual behaviour, attitudes, thoughts,

and beliefs are influenced by comparison with other people and groups. In
other words, individuals compare themselves or the group they belong to
and others who are similar in many ways to form their actions, thoughts,
and beliefs. Therefore, social comparison affects human beings in many
ways.

It can affect the self-esteem of individuals. Firstly, the dark side of social
comparison influences more who has lower self-esteem than others.
Worries about how others view themselves are strongly related to one's
judgment and anxiety about social positions and negative self-awareness.
For example, there are many studies that show that your salary satisfaction
depends on how you compare to others. Satisfaction with salary is likely to
be directly related to satisfaction in life. As a result, the more cynical and
critical or low self-esteem people are likely to make a negative self-image,
the more likely they are to be negatively influenced by social comparison.

At the same time, it can have a positive effect. There are people who
appreciate their environment and live positively every time. They are
unhappy more than they are, or they feel sorry for the poor, but they think
they are happier than they are. Even if they are poor as a standard of social
wealth. The criteria for self-awareness are relative, and the evaluation of
self-awareness varies accordingly. But it affects self-esteem, which affects
people's satisfaction in life. People should evaluate themselves objectively,
but refrain from underestimating and disparaging themselves. Social
comparisons can have positive or negative effects on human life.

2. What are the differences between exchange and communal relationships?

The level of relationship you maintain depends on who you are. I maintain
a deep relationship with a kind person and never see a toxic person again.
The reason for this level of difference is that maintaining a favourable
relationship for a long time means that the relationship between the costs I
pay and the compensation I expect is balanced. If the time, effort, or cost of
maintaining a relationship exceeds the reward that you can get from a
relationship, you will no longer try to maintain it. Calculate the cost and
compensation of interacting with others like this. The theory of social
exchange is that people act when costs and compensation are balanced.
First of all, we will live by exchanging things. The most basic thing is
economic exchange. We pay a certain amount of money to purchase the
necessary products in the market. It's an economic exchange. In economic
exchange, the mentality to get maximum compensation at low-cost works.
Such an interchangeable relationship is called an exchange relationship.
On the other hand, In a communal relationship, social exchange is the
same principle in which you try to get a lot of compensation at a low cost.
However, the scope of exchange is wide. Social exchange includes not
only material things, but also trust, friendship, affection, and a sense of
legal obligation. In other words, unlike economic exchanges, qualitative or
psychological ones are also subject to exchange. In other words, social
relationships include friends and lovers who share emotions through
emotional communication.

4. Do all people from the same culture share the same view of the self? Discuss
with reference to independence and interdependence.

People live in different environments and cultures, which can affect their
personality, behaviour, and way of thinking. If you think about it roughly in
the West and the East, Westerners tend to have high self-esteem, positive
self-esteem, and high scores. On the other hand, Asians think that if other
people give a good evaluation of themselves, they are humble to deny it
and say that they were lucky. However, it is a mistake of excessive
generalization to think that all Asians have low pride in such things. It is
true that cultural traits affect the ego, but not everyone.

Greece is the beginning of a controversy that began with the Stoic school.
Each person should express their opinions and discuss them to find the
best answer. On the other hand, China places importance on living
together, as can be seen from the Analects of Confucius. Historically, the
West and the East have formed independence and interdependence.

5. Why is the fundamental attribution error considered to be ‘fundamental’?

In the U.S., when you want more coffee in a restaurant, you can hold a
glass and shake it lightly to fill yourself. But if you do the same thing in
Saudi Arabia, a waiter comes and cleans up your glass.
Think of the two sides as having such a completely different perception in
the negotiations. There are many conflicts because you don't clearly
confirm your intentions. In psychology, these mistakes are called
fundamental attribution errors. Fundamental Attribution Errors are the
assumption that other people react to something in the same way they do. I
didn't make a mistake just because other people feel cold when it's hot.
People react differently to the same situation.

In other words, it's a mistake that comes from other people thinking and
acting with them, and many managers think that they don't have customers
as they think, "Our products are the best, but our sales don't go up." This is
a fundamental imputation error. In a similar sense, there are concepts of
confirmation bias and perceptual defence. Confirmation bias" means that
you only believe and follow what you believe, think, and act. And the
perceptual defence is avoiding or defending against external stimuli (such
as advertising) or information in order to maintain existing beliefs and
attitudes. If you zoom in further, you can see the customer's position in
consumer behaviour through Zapping and Zipping. In the case of Zapping,
if you are exposed to unwanted stimuli (advertising), you skip, and if you
are exposed to stimuli (advertising), you can choose only what you want. In
this way, behaviour and beliefs are expressed in different ways depending
on my point of view and the customer's point of view, so from the
management's point of view, it is absolutely necessary to confirm to ensure
competitiveness.

The suggestion is that the point of view of the object is whom you're looking
for. From the point of view of the fundamental imputation error that we have
seen above, the beginning of the mistake is to start with the person (the
owner or the manager). That is why fundamental attribution error is
considered to be fundamental.

6. How are segregation policies related to racist stereotypes and prejudice, and
what is the relation between stereotype, prejudice and discrimination? (10 marks)

Segregation policies are forcibly separating living spaces and public

facilities by race and ethnicity. For example, there are cases where
residential facilities, schools, toilets, water supply stations, and train
passenger cars are divided into black and white. Colourism is a kind of
prejudice. Racism is another prejudice that some people believe that one
type of skin colour is superior or inferior to other types of skin colour within
a race group. Studies have shown that African Americans with pale
complexion are more discriminated against than lighter-skinned African
Americans. For example, if a white employer thinks that a dark-skinned
black employee is less capable than a light-skinned black employer, it is
colourism.

A stereotype is a belief that certain attributes are characteristic of a

particular group member. This attribute is negative and positive, and it is a
criterion for classifying people. The problems that could arise from
stereotypes include prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice shows negative
or emotional responses to groups and individual members. It involves
prejudging others. And discrimination refers to the unfair treatment of
individuals who belong to a particular group.

9. What social psychological methods are most suitable for the study of culture?
Discuss.

Cultural psychologist Patricia Greenfield has tried to study the psychology

of native Mexican called Zinacantecan. To examine their experience in crop
production, she interviewed Zinacantecans, using the same type of
questionnaire that college-educated people in the West have demonstrated
many times. However, this kind of questionnaire didn't really match
Zinacantecan. One implicit agreement with the survey methodology is that
each question is independent. The set of questions does not need to be
interactive. However, Zinacantecans expected their interaction with
Greenfield to follow the cultural norms of dialogue. In other words, when
answering a question, the questioner is expected to continue asking almost
similar questions without ignoring the answer.
But Greenfield's standard and common traditional interview method were
unfamiliar to them. A lack of cultural understanding led to the failure of
research.

To investigate the ideas of people with different cultures, people's ideas

(reflecting universal psychological tendencies) can demonstrate cultural
similarity or show cultural differences. And in the case of ideas where
cultural differences appear, there is a way to research and design them
with specific purposes to understand how different things people have
experienced in their culture can be attributed to different ways of thinking.

One of the best ways to study culture is through comparison. Studying

people from different cultures compared to your own is accompanied by
unique problems. Researchers in all fields often use the same method
because research into the effects of culture on psychological processes is
conducted virtually across all subfields of human psychology. For example,
people who study culture and personality depend on personality
psychologists' methods, and researchers who explore culture and cognition
use cognitive psychology methods. Each method has its strengths and
weaknesses. The problem with cultural psychologists is not only inheriting
the standard ambiguity of the methods they adopted in other sub-
disciplinary fields, but also inducing more ambiguity when many of those
methods are applied to studies of people in other cultures.

First, to study culture, you have to choose the culture you want to study.
One common approach to choosing the culture you want to study is to
select a sample based on the theoretical variables you are investigating. If
you want to find the degree of universality of a particular psychological
process, you may choose two cultures that differ as much as possible on a
theoretical level. For example, Avis & Harris measured mentalization by
contrasting the children of the idiots, members of the Pygmies living in the
rainforest in southeastern Cameroon. The Bikes were hunter-gatherers with
little or no exposure to Western culture, so the idiots and the Western
children showed a distinctly different cultural context. Despite these cultural
differences, children were very similar in experimental tasks, suggesting
that the development of mentalization was very similar worldwide. The
researchers chose cultures that showed great differences between them
and were able to create compelling examples of the universality of
spiritualization.

In conclusion, the important part of cultural research is to design research

with specific purposes to understand how different things in one's culture
lead to different ways of thinking and to study two cultures with very
different tendencies by comparing them from a relative perspective.