Psychology for Dummies (43 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Ever wonder what siblings are good for? Those of you who are only children may even have fantasized about having a brother or a sister. Some of us think that siblings are only good for fighting or stealing your boyfriend, but psychologists have actually found that there’s more to it than that.
Siblings have a powerful effect on our development as people. They create a family environment that would be very different without them. They’re also good sources of friendship, companionship, and affection. Sometimes they can even be role models. Three other distinct functions that siblings provide for each other are
Mutual regulation:
Acting as sounding boards and testing grounds for new behavior, like practicing a break-up speech before delivering it to a boyfriend
Direct services:
Easing of household burdens and sometimes providing practical support, such as rides, help with homework, or fashion advice
Dealing with parents:
Siblings often help by forming alliances and coalition building; this involves sticking together in times of need
Many people are familiar with sibling rivalry and discord. Research has shown that the most common negative qualities associated with siblings are antagonism and quarrelling. Some people think that the fighting goes away as we grow older. Actually, the basic emotional character of sibling relationships remains pretty stable. Interactions can change, but the feelings remain much the same.
How does that old saying go? “Friends are forever?” Or is it “Diamonds are forever?” I never can remember. I don’t have many diamonds, so it doesn’t really matter much anyway. Throughout this chapter, my intention has been to demonstrate how our social lives grow and expand. I’ve gone from self, to caregivers, to parents, to siblings, and now I’ve reached friends. Friendships are important. Why do we remember Tonto’s name? Because he’s the Lone Ranger’s friend.
Psychologists Willard Hartup and Nan Stevens provide us with a nice review of research related to friendship. They basically define
friendship
as a relationship between mutually attracted people engaged in a reciprocal relationship of exchange. Friends are different than non-friends in that our relationships are typically mutual. There’s a lot of giving, and taking, and giving again.
Good friends support us and help us cope with all of life’s problems. Making friends isn’t necessarily easy — it requires a fair amount of social skill. It doesn’t hurt if you’re socially well-adjusted either. (See Chapter 13 for more on social adjustment.) Being equal and fair helps. Knowing how to manage conflicts when they arise also helps maintain friendships.
Who are our friends? Our friends tend to be people much like ourselves. They are typically similar in age, gender, ethnicity, and ability. A lot of times they have a similar lifestyle. Especially as we get older, our friends tend to be people we work with, which means that they are typically of the same socio-economic class as us as well. Darn, no rich friends for me!
Why do we have friends? To borrow money from, why else? Actually, friendships have been found to have a positive effect on our psychological well-being. People who have good friendships tend to be more sociable, helpful, and confident. Friends are good for your health. So go out there and make a few!
In This Chapter
Developing the social skills to pay the bills
Explaining your neighbor’s behavior
Getting to know you
Communicating like a pro
O ne thing is for sure — we live in a pretty complicated world. The environment is like a symphony made up of a bunch of different instruments, each playing their own little part to create a coherent tune. Our perception of a coherent song depends a lot on our perceptual capabilities. If our perceptual capabilities are not in working order, we may think that the symphony is playing out of tune. Some of the loudest instruments in the symphony that is our environment are other people. They seem to dominate the music, standing out as central aspects of our perceptions of the environment.
What’s so special about perceiving the world in an organized manner? Ever been lost in a city without a map? It’s not much fun. But fun is the least important reason that makes the ability to organize our perceptions so important. Perceiving the environment in a coherent fashion is necessary for our survival. It seems that human survival has always depended on understanding the complexity of our environment.
Other people make up an extremely powerful force within our environment that is seemingly more important than the weather. Humans are, after all, social beings. Our survival, then, would seem to depend on our ability to understand our human environment, to say nothing of the weather. Social understanding is vital. Alliances, enemies, allocations of resources, divisions of labor, relationships, communication, and self-understanding are important aspects of our social understanding. Each of us must possess a basic level of
social skill
to get along within our human environment. Phillips gives us a good working definition of social skill: the ability to communicate and interact with others in a way that allows for one’s needs and goals to be met without interfering with other’s goals.
The following sections contain a discussion of four very important social skills: understanding other people’s behavior, understanding our own behavior, getting along with and helping other people, and communicating.
The area of psychology devoted to understanding how we go about understanding people, including ourselves, is known as
social cognition.
The word cognition is used because the focus is on the specific thought processes involved when we observe people and make inferences about them based on those observations.
We are always people watching. Have you ever gone to a public place like a park or a busy shopping mall and just watched people? It can be pretty interesting. You may notice people’s clothes, the bags that they’re carrying, the conversations that they’re having, and so on. You’re noticing all kinds of things about them and using those observations to draw conclusions.
Don’t think so? How many times have you called the young guy in the business suit driving a BMW a yuppie? Have you ever said to yourself that the teenager with purple hair and a pierced nose is just looking for attention? How do you know these things? Maybe, the yuppie is really a well-dressed car thief, or that the purpled-headed kid is conducting a psychology experiment. How do you know? Have you had a conversation with them? Probably not, but you don’t have to talk to them in order to begin drawing conclusions about them based on what you see, hear, and experience.
The complex process of drawing conclusions about people’s intentions and characteristics, based on our observations of them, is called
person perception.
We all use some assumptions in the person-perception process:
We assume that people are
causal agents
— they play an active part in producing their own behavior. This statement seems like a no-brainer, but do we assume that a cloud floats across the sky because it caused itself to float? Do weeds grow in my flowerbed because they want to, just to irritate me? I hope not; they would be some pretty rude weeds if they did. The point is that when we see someone acting in a particular way, we often infer that they intended to do so. (See Chapter 1 for more on figuring out why people do what they do.)
Another automatic assumption in the person-perception process is that we think that other people are like us, thinking and feeling in the same ways as we do. Thinking like this allows us to use ourselves in trying to understand other people. I know I cry when I’m sad, like when the Yankees lost the World Series in 2001. So, when I see someone else crying, I assume that they’re crying because they’re sad too, and maybe they saw the Yankees lose as well.
As a scientist of human behavior and mental processes, I know how difficult it can be to understand and organize my observations of other people. Psychologists have come up with specialized techniques and instruments to measure and organize their observations. Barker and Wright felt that behavior is like a river, with its continuous stream of actions connected without any apparent seam. It would be pretty hard to take one piece out of a river. So, how do we take a piece out of the stream of human behavior, the
behavioral stream?
Newston and Engquist stated that we all possess the natural ability to select “breakpoints,” or freeze-frames, of behavior as natural informational units.
We pull out samples of people’s behavior that appear to have separate intentions. This is kind of like looking at someone’s hair and seeing the mass of it move in unison. We don’t assume that each strand moves to the beat of its own drummer; they all move in response to the movement of the head as a whole. Maybe a better way of looking at it is to think about watching a football game. Is it easier to pay attention to the players on the front line who move like a big, mindless mass or the quarterback, running-back, or wide receiver who moves independently of the line? We notice the “independent movers.”
We also have a natural tendency to notice abrupt shifts or changes in behavior. (See Chapter 16 for more on changes in behavior.) If someone walking toward us gradually moves in our direction, we’re less likely to notice the movement than if the person jumps 3 feet to the side in our direction. Behaviors that stand out are more likely to be noticed.