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Reflection Paper Mathew MacGregor Salt Lake Community College

REFLECTION PAPER

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There are countless connections I can make between what I studied here in psychology and what I have learned in other classes here at Salt Lake Community College. For example, a couple classes that enhanced what I learned in this psychology course and vice-versa would be: economic 1600, communication 1010, and biology 1090. Back in the spring of 2017, I took this economics 1600 class; which was an introduction to economic system course. I figured out that economics is very similar to that of social psychology. I learning that economics is about people and how they interact with each other, and generally must answer three fundamental questions; “what are we going to produce, how are we going to produce it, and who is going to get what we produce”. After taking this psychology course, I started to notice interesting connections between this course and economics 1600. I noticed that my economics course always emphasized the important concept that humans are social creatures that are driven by incentives. In psychology they go a little deeper, they not only tell you that humans are social creatures, but that we are so social in fact that the mere absence of social interaction can have severe physiological and psychological impacts on a person’s health. I learned not only are humans driven by incentives, but that there are also different theories to as of how the whole process of motivation works with humans; such as classical and operant conditioning. There is also the part of how biological factors and cultural factors both influence and incentivizes us. Overall, I feel like I better understand economics through the research I have done in this psychology course.

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There was also this communication 1010 course I took my second semester here at Salt Lake Community College. I learned to not jump to conclusions, to listen to another person’s perspective regardless if I agree or not, and to be able to work together in a team effectively. There is something I learned in psychology that I experienced all too well in this communications course. At the end of the course we had this massive group essay that was roughly 20+ pages long and required a lot of research and dedication. In this psychology class years later, I learned why my group seemed so unproductive and essentially left me with all the work. It was something called “social loafing”, where each person tends to exert less effort in a group because of the reduced ability for the individual effort. Everyone in my five-person group put in minimal effort to just get their part done, while I was the only person that seemed to want to get an “A” in the class, so I basically wrote 90% of the assignment. The last connection I will make was with a class called biology 1090. This was a class on human biology and physiology. I ended up learning a lot about the brain, spinal cord, and how the body communicates with itself. The thing I did not learn however was the psychological aspect. I knew all the systems in the human body, but how they all come together to affect our behavior and consciousness, I had no idea. In this psychology class however, we not only went over the parts of the brain, but we also went over how it affects our behavior. I learned many things that I had already learned in biology 1090, such as the brain regions, neurons, and different nervous systems. What put it all together is when I started to learn more than just what the eyes were, how they worked, and what part of the brain was responsible for visual processing. I learned things like how our vision plays a large role in our memory retention, conscious awareness, and even a part in influencing how we behave in social interactions with other humans.