If you are looking for BPCC-132 IGNOU Solved Assignment solution for the subject Introduction to Social Psychology, you have come to the right place. BPCC-132 solution on this page applies to 2022-23 session students studying in BAG courses of IGNOU.
BPCC-132 Solved Assignment Solution by Gyaniversity
Assignment Code: BPCC-132/Asst /TMA /2022-23
Course Code: BPCC-132
Assignment Name: Introduction to Social Psychology
Year: 2022-2023
Verification Status: Verified by Professor
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Assignment – One
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Answer the following descriptive category questions in about 500 words each. Each question carries 20 marks. 2 x 20=40
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1. Describe the components of culture and discuss the agents of enculturation
Ans) The components of culture are listed below:
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Components of Culture
Dynamic nature: The average, mainstream, and representative tendencies in a given population are described by a dynamic system called culture. Culture cannot be used as a rigid rulebook to determine how everyone in a certain culture should behave.
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System of rules: Different cultural practises, laws, attitudes, or values do not coexist in a vacuum. Instead, culture refers to a system that consists of a constellation of these psychological elements that appear independent but are in fact functionally interconnected.
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Groups and units: The degree to which culture is reflected varies. The units that reflect culture are particular individuals inside the group when we look at it from the perspective of individuals within groups. The precise units expressing the culture in a large group made up of many smaller groupings are called sections.
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Ensuring survival of the group: As a behavioural restraint, a culture's set of rules has this effect. Chaos may result if the rules are not followed. These guidelines provide and encourage a framework for social order, assisting the smaller units within the group in getting along with one another.
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Psychological and behavioural components: Along with its objective and material components, culture is also made up of the thoughts and emotions of the people who inhabit it. Aspects of culture that are subjective and immaterial include attitudes, values, beliefs, ideas, norms, and behaviours.
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Individual differences: The extent to which different people in a specific culture embody and adhere to its values, attitudes, beliefs, conventions, behaviours, etc. varies. As a result, there are individual variances in how well people adhere to cultural values, attitudes, beliefs, conventions, and behaviours.
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Agents of Enculturation
Parents and Siblings: The parents have the earliest environmental influence on an infant's personality and other psychological characteristics.
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LeVine proposed a hierarchy of three parental objectives, which are as follows:
The physical survival of the offspring.
Encouragement of actions that support independence.
Promotion of morals and other cultural values.
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Extended Family: To raise a child, a village is needed. Or at least it requires a broader family, one that includes more than just parents and their kids, in many non-European American cultures. "A group of people who generally live under one roof, eat food prepared in one kitchen, hold common property, participate in common family worship, and are related to one another as some particular type of kinder," is how Karve defines a joint family. The operative word in this detailed definition is "generally."
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Peer Relations: A peer group is made up of a small number of people who are essentially close friends, have the same age range, and participate in related activities together. From an early age, kids connect with other kids their own age who might become their future playmates.
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Education: Remember how we said that whether there was a school nearby would determine whether siblings had beneficial influence on a child's development. Both formal and informal education play a crucial role in assimilating people into society by imparting culturally relevant knowledge and values.
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Religion: Religion and education were not always kept apart as separate things. Children would receive both education and moral instruction from religious advocates, and educational institutions promoted religion. Torah, the sacred book of Judaism in ancient Israel, provided guidance and promoted literacy. However, the schools only accepted guys. The Islamic mosques in Medina began hosting classes around 622 AD.
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2. Discuss the types of communication and communication style. Describe the barriers of effective communication.
Ans) Considering that it is active, ongoing, reciprocal, and dynamic, communication is best characterised as a process.
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Types of Communication
There are many ways to communicate, but verbal communication is the most crucial. Oral and written communication are the next two categories under verbal exchange. The spoken word is the most fundamental component of oral communication since it is the quickest and most precise because messages can be clarified through continuing conversation. Written forms of communication include letters, memos, office orders, e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, etc. that are used to exchange ideas, thoughts, understanding, etc.
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Along with spoken or written messages, nonverbal communication also includes nonverbal cues that are sent by the communicator. Examples could be a person's speech inflection, facial expressions, head nods, eye contact, posture, or walking gait.
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Even though verbal and nonverbal communication are two distinct processes, they both happen simultaneously. A message's spoken component communicates its substance or information. It is metacommunication because the nonverbal element conveys how the verbal message should be understood. People are more inclined to believe nonverbal messages when they conflict with spoken ones.
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Communication Style
Every person has a dominant communication style that is uniquely their own. Different verbal and nonverbal communication patterns are used by people with various communication styles. The four main categories of communication styles are assertive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, and passive. Each form of communication sends out certain messages to its audience and has particular results.
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Passive communication: People that use passive communication are viewed as shy, people-pleasers, and they frequently side with others in order to avoid conflict. They frequently display confusing body language, avoid making eye contact, put their hands near or over their mouths, fidget with writing instruments like pens and pencils while talking, and chew on them while listening. They come seem as weak, timid, and indecisive people with poor self-esteem because of the way they carry themselves.
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Aggressive communication: People that employ this communication style frequently violate the rights of others and impose their own needs and opinions upon them. Using this method of communication can result in yelling and, in some situations, physical violence. To emphasise their point of view, these people frequently employ an aggressive tone and body language.
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Passive-aggressive communication: Due to their inability to control their emotions and feelings, people who communicate in this way frequently utilise passive techniques that come across as aggressive. They occasionally employ manipulation to achieve their goals, even when it doesn't appear to be manipulation.
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Assertive communication: People that communicate in an aggressive manner are able to express their opinions and feelings clearly and respectfully. They take into account and regard not only their own needs but also those of others. Relationships with others can be strengthened, balanced, and courteous with the use of this communication style.
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Barriers to Effective Communication
Barriers to communication are anything that affects the message or information during the "encoding-sending-decoding" process between the sender and the receiver. Communication barriers can be broadly divided into two categories:
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Physical-environmental barriers: The physical-environmental aspects of communication are referred to as environmental and physical obstacles. These can include a noisy communication channel, a poor communication time, or a great distance between the transmitter and the recipient.
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Psychological barriers: Poor listening abilities, biases, prejudices, mistrust, negative attitude, fear of failure, evaluation anxiety, public embarrassment, compulsive thoughts of being adversely appraised by others, inferiority complex, etc. all contribute to psychological barriers.
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Assignment Two
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Answer the following short category questions in about 100 words each. Each question carries 5 marks. 6 x 5 = 30
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3. Explain the types and components of group.
Ans) Various group types and components is as follows:
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Types of Groups
Depending on how closely the group members are believed to be bonded, groups can be categorised into two types: common-bond groups and common-identity groups.
Entitativity gauges how much a group is viewed by its members as a single coherent unit. A group made up of family members is one that has significant entitativity.
Families, castes, and other pre-existing organisations that offer membership to individuals are considered primary groups. While someone may decide to join a secondary group in order to accomplish specific objectives.
A formal group has clearly stated rules, expectations for each member, and well-defined standards. The reverse side, there aren't any fixed rules and regulations in an informal gathering.
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Components of Group
A member's status may be determined by their physical characteristics, usefulness to the organization's goals, and conformity to group norms.
Roles outline the expected behaviours from various group members who hold particular roles within the group.
Norms are the unspoken guidelines that govern how a group's members ought to or ought not to behave.
The factor that keeps a group together is cohesiveness. Cohesiveness describes how fervently group members want to stay together.
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4. Describe the factors affecting conformity and its resistance.
Ans) Factors Affecting Conformity: A variety of factors influence how much people conform to societal standards.
One of the most important elements that determines the degree of conformity we are likely to exhibit to the group's norms is cohesion and the desire to be accepted by that group.
In general, we experience increased pressure to fit in with the group as its membership grows. However, there has been no solid evidence linking the size of the group with the degree of conformity.
Norms can be categorised as either descriptive or injunctive in addition to formal and informal. Injunctive norms inform us what should be done in a scenario, whereas descriptive norms describe what individuals often do in a situation.
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Resisting Conformity: Despite the pressure to fit in that our desires to be liked and to be correct put on us, there are many situations where people opt to defy the norm and stand out. The following characteristics characterise our capacity to resist conformity:
Must keep uniqueness.
Maintaining personal control is necessary.
Societal norms that support individuality.
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5. Discuss the motivation behind pro-social behaviour.
Ans) There are only a few persons who can help the person in need at any one time. Additionally, not everyone shows the same level of helping behaviour. Even if someone offers assistance once, they can later fail to do so again or in a different circumstance. Social psychologists have developed a wide range of hypotheses to explain the motivations underlying our pro-social behaviour.
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According to Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, and Birch's Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis, when we see someone in need, we experience empathy, which motivates us to take action. The negative-state relief concept contends that our pro-social behaviour is motivated by a desire to alleviate unpleasant emotions, in contrast to the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Another explanation for the motivations behind pro-social behaviour is provided by the empathetic joy hypothesis.
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According to the empathy delight hypothesis, helping others has a positive impact on those around us and the person we are helping in turn helps others in return. The competitive altruism perspective asserts that, in addition to being motivated by empathy, the need to lessen our own negative emotions. Kin selection theory states that our desire to pass on our genes to the next generation is what motivates us as a species to be pro-social.
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6. Explain the causes of aggression.
Ans) Aggression in a person can be caused by a variety of personal circumstances. It is believed that frustration frequently leads to aggression. Studies show that cockiness, unjustified criticism, taunting in public, other people's acts that damage or threaten to damage our reputation or standing, etc. are some of the strongest triggers for aggressive behaviour. Numerous studies have found a strong correlation between alcohol use and aggressive and violent behaviour. The socialisation mechanism that protects us from learning to act aggressively in social encounters is weakened by alcohol.
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Although it's a common misconception that youngsters are less prone than adults to act violently or aggressively, there isn't always a clear correlation between age and violence. Social rejection is a major contributor to human violence. Since people thrive on social interaction, being isolated from society has a detrimental impact on their self-esteem and self-image, which makes them more hostile and aggressive in social settings. Another theory that attempts to explain human aggressiveness contends that individuals use violence to exert control over the social behaviour of others and to meet their own wants. Anger makes people more inclined to behave aggressively when confronted with a weapon.
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7. Explain sources of errors in social cognition.
Ans) Humans intentionally strive to think logically in order to make decisions, assessments, and judgments about other people and events in social contexts that are somewhat error-free. However, there are times when our social thought process disregards key logical norms and we exert less cognitive effort to understand our social environment, which ultimately results in social cognition errors.
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Cognitive-Experiential Self Theory: According to the cognitive-experiential self-hypothesis, when assessing a social situation, we frequently favour our intuition thoughts based on prior experiences over logical reasoning.
Negativity Bias: The idea behind the negativity bias is that people tend to assign more weight to negative social information and entities, even when it is of equal intensity.
Planning Fallacy: When estimating how long a task will take to complete, we frequently underestimate the time required, and when the activity is really carried out, we typically exceed the time period that we had allotted ourselves.
Counterfactual Thinking: Contrary to what actually happened, people have a tendency to think in a counterfactual manner.
Magical Thinking: Magical thinking is characterised by erroneous presumptions frequently connected to the laws of resemblance or contagion.
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8. Describe the historical development of psychology.
Ans) Psychology is defined as "the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes". Philosophical interest in the human mind and behaviour dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, and India. Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1854 in Leipzig, Germany when Gustav Fechner created the first theory of how judgments about sensory experiences are made and how to experiment on them.
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Later, 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded in Leipzig, Germany, the first Psychological laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research. Also in the 1890s, Hugo Münsterberg began writing about the application of psychology to industry, law, and other fields. Lightner Witmer established the first psychological clinic in the 1890s. The 20th century saw a reaction to Edward Titchener's critique of Wundt's empiricism. The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of cognitive science, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human mind..
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