Social thinking

Social thinking

The concept of social thinking profoundly affects the sociological understanding of social problems. Many theoretical perspectives provide further knowledge of social issues. People experience many different social issues on personal levels, while others involve more than one person. Some are poor, and others are unemployed, many are deficient in health, drink too much, or even family problems. When people hear about these problems, they tend to think that the problem belongs to the victims alone. However, social thinking stresses that such individual issues are rooted in problems that come from social aspects.

To understand social psychology, it is crucial to distinguish public issues and personal issues. Personals issues are issues that affect an individual, and the society, as well as the individual himself, blame their own moral and personal failing. Examples include problems like unemployment, divorce, eating disorder as well as failing in examinations. On the other side, public issues refer to the issues that affect the public or a group of individuals. The problem is based on the social structure and culture of the society (Gazzola, 2019). To understand the structural base of private issues, it is essential to know the social imagination.

This will allow individuals to understand private problems as public issues. For instance, in the case of unemployment, where an individual is unemployed, people may tend to think that the individual is lazy or lacks the required skills. However, if a group of people is unemployed, people will start viewing unemployment as a social problem. Both arguments are outstanding, and the possible solutions range from political and economic considerations.

Some of the major theoretical perspectives are the attribution theory. This theory focuses on how people explain other people’s behavior (Tannebaum, 2020). People have two different ways of attributing the cause of a particular event. They can either attribute the cause to be external or situational. For external attribution, people relate the course of an event to a fundamental purpose, while for situational, people attribute the cause to factors within a person (Jackson, 2019). The theory applies to the everyday life of a person and may affect the attitude as well as the behavior of a person.

In my personals experience, the attribution theory applies in different situations. For instance, my sister was driving in a freeway. Her car broke down when she was almost getting to town. According to her, the breakdown had happened due to her ignorance about it. This means that she is making an internal attribution because she thinks the situation resulted from an internal factor, which is ignorance. In the same situation, if my sister believed that the car had broken because of it being old, then she could be making an external attribution.

Another way of viewing attribution theory is through distinguishing between stable and unstable attributions. For firm attribution, it is where people infer that a situation occurred due to unchanging, stable factors (Abdulsalam, & Feng, 2019). On the other side, unstable attribution is when people infer that unpredictable temporary factors caused an event. I have a personal experience with this kind of attribution. In my high school examinations, I used to fail terribly in mathematics. Almost all the time, I attributed to having bad luck when it came to mathematics. This means that I was making stable attributions because I had no control over fate. On the other side, whenever I failed English, I attributed that it was because I didn’t have much time to revise for my examination. In this case, I was making a temporary attribution because the cause of my failure was due to unstable factors that I had control over.

 

 

 

References

Abdulsalam, M., & Feng, J. (2019). Distinguish the Stable and Unstable Plaques Based on Arterial Waveform Analysis. Procedia Structural Integrity, 15, 2-7.

Gazzola, P. (2019). Social Thinking. Creation of Value for Stakeholders. Economia Aziendale Online, 9(4), 413-425.

Jackson, M. (2019). Utilizing attribution theory to develop new insights into tourism experiences. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 38, 176-183.

Tannebaum, R. P. (2020). Controversial Public Issues in the Secondary Classroom. Teacher Education Quarterly, 47(1), 7-26.