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This week’s research has tended to focus upon more psychologically based topics as opposed to the previous weeks that have tended to focus more on the sociology part of my research.

Within psychology there are a number of different branches that that focus in on a number of different specific areas and the ones that I think that are more related to me and my research areas are social psychology and cognitive psychology. Social in an exploration into the way in which people’s thoughts, behaviours and feelings are influence by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. Within this branch of psychology, the individual is examined as a member of the society through socialisation. It is stated that the major and most determining part of socialisation occurs in the early childhood as this is the time at which a child learns most social norms and values. This in itself is really interesting as you might argue that actually with the web becoming such a fundamental part of our lives, a vast number of our norms and values are being are learnt in this area. If this can be accepted to be the case, it cannot really be said that children are readily on the Web as they tend to fall within the category of being adolescents, early adults and onwards. In this respect you might have to argue that socialisation as a process is beginning to occur more and more later on in life because of the deployment of the Web in our lives and thus the theory needs to be updated.

Sigmund Freud in his work on psychoanalysis he found that there were generally 3 stages of being (1) id, (2) ego and (3) superego. He believed that all 3 had to be in perfect balance with one another or otherwise the person would be either too deficient in some areas or over compensating in others. For example too much id would lead to a person being governed by their impulses and being selfish where as too much superego and the individual is too rigid, moralistic and bossy.  In an online word you are able to almost be a completely different person; may be the person that you wished you were or just someone different from your everyday life. You can therefore be that person who acts on his id as it were and is selfish online and be governed by your impulses in ways that you would allow yourself offline in the real world. As a result may be there needs to be a changing of how we perceive these various areas.

You can also see from the above how important trust is. In this areas as you are able to be the person that you wish you were able to be and for on the other end to interact with that person you have to able to trust that they are who they say they are and are not someone who is really too much id trying to be different.

Allport has come up with a theory in respect if clustering traits and the way in which personality is developed. He argues that thee are 5 central traits that reflect a characteristic way of behaving and dealing with others. Alongside these are secondary traits that are more permeable and prone to change such as likes. The five big ones don’t include trust; the extent to which you are trustworthy, the factors that you take into consideration, the extent to which you are able to trust etc. It is interesting that it is not regarded as one on its own; yet it could be argued to fall under the fifth which the extent of an individual’s openness to new experiences versus their resistance to these new opportunities. It might be conceded that trust now needs to be one of these because especially in the case of  ages of 15-30 a lot of personality is built online. Even away from the online world, there is not a notion of dishonesty or trust and this could by proxy therefore lead to the conclusion that it actually is not that important or as important as it may be believed.