Applied Social Psychology Literature Review

Throughout this course, you have been exploring the ways in which social psychological principles can be applied to various careers. This week, you will write literature review of articles that cover some of the main topics of applied social psychology. You should frame your review as if you were explaining the purpose of the field to someone who does not know about social psychology. You will conduct a literature review that contains five articles, each of which focuses on a different theory. Two of the five articles can be from the literature review for your case study that you wrote last week; however, they each must cover different theories. The other three articles should pertain to different theories that have been discussed throughout the course or that will be discussed in Week Six. 

 

Remember, even though these articles are not necessarily related, the literature review must still have a thesis statement (e.g., Applied social psychology is a field that is important because it is relevant to...) and a conclusion that reinforces your claim. Since you are allowed to use your review of two articles from your previous literature review (ATTACHED), please ensure you make any necessary modifications to your analysis so that they match the thesis statement and conclusion of this literature review.

The literature review must be five to seven pages in length, not including title and reference. All of the articles that you use must be recent (published within the past 10 years). You should also cite other material (e.g., seminal works about the theories) as appropriate to help you contextualize and explain the articles that you are discussing.

Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW 1 Literature Review
Cynthia Wade
Dr. Brandy Goldston
PSY 610 Applied Social Psychology
08/04/2017 LITERATURE REVIEW 2
Literature Review For a long time now society has been clear of blame when individuals develop characters
that are questionable. A lot of people when criminals are caught blame it on the financial
situation of the offender as the reason why the offender engaged in crime whereas others blame it
on the economic situation of the country and others blame it on poor policing by the disciplined
forces to ensure that crime is stamped out of a locality or a region (Assink et. al, 2015). However
after a close research I would like to believe otherwise. So is a person’s character really
determined by the morals of the society that they came from or their behavior is influenced by
the economic situation of a country that they are in, that is what this paper is about to discover.
Analysis
According to (Punyasavatsut, 2016), he states that the crime rates that are experienced in
a country are directly related to the economic condition of the country. He states that most
criminals are people who have been frustrated emotionally because they have always lacked
what they need in life. For this reason, they have always ended up looking for it by force. He
goes on to give an example by saying that the reason why a carjacker would steal a car, is
because he needs money. If the same carjacker had a car, he would not have gone into stealing;
instead he would take his car and resell it so that he could be able to make profit out of it. His
idea is supported by (Park, Kim & Mi-Seon, 2012) who in their studies reveal that almost 70% of
the people who they interviewed and they were incarcerated especially as juveniles were in jail
cells because they lacked money and they had to find ways to survive even if it meant stealing so
that they could be able to maintain their needs. Their study was opposed by that, which was
conducted by (Ott, 2014), the following statistic was revealed; LITERATURE REVIEW 3 According to the statistics that they had collected it became visible that the crime rate in
the US was going down despite the rising level of unemployment rate. According to the statistics
that they used in their study, it can be correctly seen that while the level of unemployment was at
an all-time high of 5.8% in the United States, the crime rate was at an all-time low at 5%. This
study revealed that although there are people that engage in criminal activities because of their
living standards, it is not the only reason why people engage in theft and crime. There are far
many different reasons that make people engage in crime which is not related to the economic
conditions of a person or a country.
According to the social cognitive theory that was written by (Tavory, 2015) in his
research, he was able to find out that an individual becomes who is environment makes him to
become. He seems to agree with what the advancer of the social cognitive theory who was called
Albert Bandura had to say. According to him, if an individual has been brought up in an LITERATURE REVIEW 4 environment that is rough and which is full of rowdy individuals, they are likely to become what
their environment is teaching them to become. According to him, an individual grows and
becomes what his environment teaches them to become. According to the theory advanced by
Bandura, kids who were brought up watching violent television shows, they are most likely to be
violent when they grow up. Therefore according to Tavory, sometimes criminals do not engage in
crime because they have to, but sometimes they do it because they think that it is cool by their
standards and therefore, they engage themselves in criminal activities.
He gives an example of the Al Qaeda arm which before the death of their leader Osama
Bin Laden used to threaten the United States and even in a number of times they were able to
inflict damage on the citizens of the United States of America. In his study he investigates a
former member of the group who states that, most of the people who were in Al Qaeda

Attachments:

• 1506156804-literature review paper.docx