Social Psychology: Bringing It All Together

The easiest thing that we have learned since we arrive in this world is interacting with other people. As we grow and develop, we get to see and interact with different types of people and we try to understand them through social psychology. We understand why people act the way they do and why some judge others and social psychology made us understand why we tend to decide with others and agree with their judgment rather than have our own opinions and ideas about the matter. Social psychology introduces us to our self and to our group or the people we belong with.

We tend to try to understand our self and how we are as a person then we try to act and behave accordingly as to whom we are and this concept is called self-concept. This is our idea of which we are our understanding of our self (Mcleod, 2008). This composes of our belief about our self, our attitude and behavior and our opinion as how we are supposed to behave and how we really behave (Feenstra, 2011). As for me, my self-concept is that I am a worrier and I said this because I always end up telling other people about my worries so I share it with them. This is very different with my friend who always keeps her taught to herself and stays aloof all the time. Then aside from our self-concept, we also have what we call our self-schema. Self-schema is the way we look at ourselves hence it can be associated with what we liked to do. My self-schema is that I am a gardener because I love working on my garden. Every time I see something about gardening, I can easily associate myself with it because of my self-schema hence my behavior shows how I perceive myself. Self-schema is the same as self-awareness hence I am aware of myself either publicly or privately. Private self-awareness are things that we know about our self while the public self-schema is the way we behave around other people because we want them to see us that way. Hence private self-schema is being real with our self like our real feelings and emotions while the public schema takes care of our public image.

For the public awareness that we have, we try our best to dress, talk and behave as best as we can because it is how we want to be seen by other people. For example, we talk as if we knew a lot of things and we do this to impress because we do know that we don’t know that much. Our public schema wants us to show that we are smart although we knew that we are not that smart actually. If we think like this, then it will show our self-efficacy and self-esteem and how we think we are or the value of our self in our own world. This is link with our personal value of our own achievements and things that we are proud of (David Sheslow PhD, 2008). Happy people have higher self-esteem because they know they are happy and a happy person can do pretty much anything they want. If you are lonely or angry on the other hand, your self-esteem is low and you don’t feel like socializing with anyone else because of your