How social perception can automatically influence behavior.

I liked this article because it opens the door to many possiblities. It closely relates to the self-fulfilling prophecy that we discussed last week except within others. These studys that they did were facinating and it all makes you wonder; Am I really in charge of what I am doing? Or have I been influenced by someone else in someway to do what I am doing now. The article does hold some weight here. I can think of times in my own life where I have been influenced by an outside source and ended up following the same path without consciously knowing it. It can be as simple as hanging out with someone who says the word "dude" alot, before you know it your saying the ridiculous word everytime you hang out with that person.
In thinking about this article, I would say that the better way to test this phenomenon would be in a naturalistic observation, over a larger extent of time. This way you could measure the extent of the action and how long it goes on and also if the action can be changed by introducing another prime in relation to the the first.
In conclusion, I think knowing this kind of information could be very helpful when it comes to youth and prevention but also like most things this kind of knowledge could be very harmful in cultures where blowing yourself up is a popular thing to do or the group suicide issue in Japan.

MySpace and Social Psychology

Self-presentation and Gender on MySpace
Adriana M. Manago et al.
Published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008)

I thought this article was cool because it was a study done on something that almost everyone is familiar with. The researchers in this study examined what they defined as “emerging adults” and how they establish their self-identity and their interactions with fellow MySpacers. Manago, et al. determined that by using MySpace people were able to express themselves in different ways than they could in the offline world, and often used their page to exhibit to viewers the “self” they want to become. The study was conducted from surveying a group of volunteers from psychology classes in the 18-24 year old age range. The participants were split into same sex focus groups with a moderator whose purpose was to keep the conversation on track and to extract more answers by using pointed questions. The responses were then coded for what themes they touched on. The themes for the purpose of this article were self-presentation, social identity and gender identity.

This article is relevant to class discussions because it gives a real life display of how people affect their social reality. People who are frequent users of MySpace often have their “offline” reality and then their reality on this social network. Friends on MySpace are not necessarily people that the user knows in real life. This networking site allows people and almost non-threatening way to explore social groups and norms in a way that is anonymous. Until this Social Psychology class I had never realized the impact that MySpace had in life outside of the opportunity to stay connected to people.