Social Psychology 2019

First, a personal note / soapbox.  I take a keen interest in the decay of modern day relationships, and relationships in general, because I come from a 2-generations-divorced family and don't want to end up the same way. I have witnessed firsthand the bitterness and pain this causes between kids and their parents, as well as the emotional damage it does to parents but especially to their kids, and even though it has been over 18 years since my parents were divorced, the impacts of this event, psychologically and otherwise, affect me to this day. I gained a further interest in relationships and social psychology in high school, seeing what I perceived to be utterly futile and meaningless so-called relationships around me. How is it that two people can meet, claim to be in love in a couple of weeks, and be bitter enemies, all by the end of the month? What leads to a relationship succeeding, or failing? And most importantly, what things can I look for, can I do, to maximize the chan...

Relationships and attraction are two pretty complex topics. In trying to think of ways to explore these areas a little further, I decided to conduct a little social psychology research and get some information from a local population to answer two main questions: how do people in our local environment view relationships, and what makes them view them the way that they do? I was curious about whether our local environment here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, specifically Houghton, even more specifically the MTU community, is unique in how relationships are viewed and experienced, or if we fit the mold discussed in our textbook and other literature. To get my answers, I created a simple 14-question survey and sent it out to a variety of family, friends, coworkers, and classmates, all in the local area. I received a total of 23 responses, none of which are in our social psychology class. After looking at the data I collected, I was able to make some links and connections to possible r...

In our post industrial capitalistic society, we exchange our labor for money in order to purchase what we need and what we want. However, this dynamic is not restricted to our economics and has also found its way into our interpersonal relationships. We've learned in our class about equity theory, where people are the most satisfied with a relationship when, for each partner, the ratio between what they put in and what they get out of the relationship is nearly the same. Even if one member makes a greater contribution, the relationship will still be considered equitable as long as they benefit more from it. In just the definition of equity theory, this expectation of equivalent exchange echos what is also found in capitalism, but there are more similarities to be found in three of the four propositions of equity theory. Parallels in Propositions “Proposition I: Individuals will try to maximize their outcomes (where outcomes equal reward minus punishments)” (Traupmann, 1981, p46...