Monkey see, monkey do

Recently, I have been talking about taking initiatives, doing volunteer work and just taking the opportunity to be better stewards of the environment. I feel that if more and more people decide to do just that, then it would become the norm. Recycling would soon become part of our lifestyle in Singapore!

I've read some notes on social psychology online here. I feel that many of the points brought up can be applied here. For example, normative social influence, which is "influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid rejection". I interpreted this as: if many people around person A recycles, then person A is likely to be influenced by their habits, and also begin to recycle.

But I suppose, that could also be mindless conformity, also mentioned in the slides. According to the slides, it is "using others as cues to behave without thinking or dealing with the dilemma of perception/thoughts and others' perceptions and thoughts". Personally, I observe mindless conformity as being the more prevalent type of influence in Singapore.

I was glad to see in the slides that our actions can affect our attitudes. One reason mentioned was because of cognitive dissonance, which is "the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change". (Google definition) How I saw this was even if we did not fully understand at first why we are following our friends' habits of recycling, we would change our attitudes about recycling sooner or later because we want to see consistency between our actions and attitudes.

I'm not sure if my understanding of this social psychology is right, but I hope to learn more about this in the subsequent years of study I will undergo in NUS.