Social Psychology Answering Questions Research

Social Psychology
Name
Institution
Introduction
Social psychology entails understanding how individuals behave within their social context. Rubin & Brown (2013) describes Social Psychology as a field of social science that seeks to find out the causes and nature of individuals’ behavior within a social set up. In other words social psychology is the study of people’s feelings, behaviors, intentions, beliefs and thoughts that can be influenced by real, implied and/or imagined presence of other people. Therefore, this topic is mainly concerned with the human behaviors that are determined by other people and where it took place. Social Psychologists deal dealing with those factors that may make people to behave in a given manner before other people and also determining scenarios that may lead people to behave in a way that they are behaving. There have been different articles that have been written by other scholars before on the subject of Social Psychology. One of those articles that have been written about the subject of Social Psychology is the one that was written by the American Psychological Association on March 23, 2013, which wanted to find out “the Relational Toll of Living in a Sexist and Heterosexist Context.”
This paper explores Social psychology in relation to living in a sexist and heterosexist context.
Living in a Sexist and Heterosexist Environment
Human beings are naturally social animals and as the say goes, no man is an island and no man stands alone. Relationships; mostly those romantic ones are the central aspect of people’s social life and they are the primary source of support. For women and sexual minority like lesbians, queer and bisexual; are hindered from experiencing quality relationships by the numerous oppressions that they have to encounter in their day to day lives. They mostly experience sexist and heterosexist oppression or discrimination and also internalized heterosexism and sexism. Theories about relational feminist points out that those experiences of cruelty and a feeling of being marginalized as well as a sense of feeling powerless that may catalyze people to conform to dangerous relational schemas like self-silence or isolation that if not checked may injure relationships and this will lead to low quality of relationships. It is important to remember that self-silencing normally takes place when a person prioritizes other people or another person’s needs over his or her personal needs just to avoid causing conflicts and also to maintain the relationship that they have with others. More often than not, it is women who tend to be susceptible of participating in this kind of restraining form of relationship due to the role of their gender and this makes them to socialize like second class human beings (Pearce, 2013).
In the research that was recently conducted about 540 women, it was found out that most sexist as well as heterosexists’ oppression and the level of internal sexists and heterosexists are each relating to silencing of self behaviors and beliefs that resulted into low relationship quality. Put in another way, from the study it is pretty clear that gender oppression and sexually marginalized that appear in romantic rela...