Classmate’s posts and respond to at least two of your peers.
First, I chose the cognitive school of thought. The task to choose a school of thought and then to find an article related to an issue in the world right now was not an easy task. After reading and rereading about the different influential people in the cognitive school of thought, it was settled upon that the choice would be George Alexander Kelly. The issue found in the world today is domestic violence. Kelly’s mostly known for his Personal Construct Theory, a theory that each person has a choice in how to deal with certain situations at hand. His ideas, at the time, were against the main current in psychology; therefore making his work radical and very debatable. The main issue others had with his ideas and theories was that each person has a different outlook on life and a different path of coming to a conclusion about something. “…Kelly remarks that one of the ways his system is at odds with mainstream psychology in his time is its insistence on anticipation of events rather than reaction to events” (Harré, 2006). His theory focused more on individuality in psychology more so than statistical data that lumped people together. Unfortunately, this type of psychology has not been favored until recently in the last decade. The article to be discussed and compared to the Personal Construct Theory is about violence, decision-making, anger, interpersonal, and control. The reason I chose this theorist and school of thought to compare this article to is that for domestic violence and decision-making is mostly a decision-making process. Kelly’s theory states that when a person is presented with an issue, they will construct their outlook and act accordingly (not react, but decide and execute actions). In this article, Social Information Processing (SIP) model is the basis for the research. SIP is a model which “outlines different stages in cognitive processing and decision-making that may be deficient in men who engage in interpersonal violence” (Nedegaard & Sbrocco, 2014). It was found that there was substantial evidence to support their claim that men who were angered that had abusive tendencies had negative behavior as opposed to men who were angered and not abusive who still had positive behaviors. The abusive men had two outlooks which were to alleviate the issue and their “partner’s self-image”. This study would have been pushed aside had it come along in Kelly’s time. Without Kelly’s theory and his view on individual psychology, these types of researches would be null and void or overlooked. Whenever abusive behaviors are discussed, it is hard to explain them as reflexes or automatic reactions to their environment. Instead, there is a construct of a specific outlook, a decision-making process, and then the act itself. A simple way to explain this is that if someone were to scare another person unexpectedly, that person may react by punching without even thinking. Now, let’s say instead of reacting immediately, that person who was scared sits down and decideshours later to exact revenge, that is a decision-making process that does not involve any sort of natural reflex. There were limitations to the study, however. It was noted that the environment from which this data was observed and collected was not natural enough. This means that the abuse was observed in a laboratory and not in the participants’ natural environment; therefore, the abuse could have been greater without being witnessed by others (Nedegaard & Sbrocco, 2014).