HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Maria is a newly-arrived Puerto Rican girl whose brother heads a gang called The Sharks against the Caucasian gang called The Jets. We will analyze Maria's character with the perspective of rational choice and social behavior. The rivalry between the gangs is in place from the beginning, but it reaches a fever pitch when Maria falls for Tony, the founder of the Jets, at a local dance. West Side Story is the classic tragedy of Romeo & Juliet set in a modern setting (Coleman 2000). The setting is the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1950s with conflict between rival street gangs rather than families.

The study of social behavior is often referred to as "social psychology", as the character of Maria, but the reality is that studying social interactions is not solely the domain of psychologists--sociologists and anthropologists, among others, also study social interactions in various ways. What distinguishes social psychology from these other disciplines is the emphasis on the individual as the focus of study--that is, social psychologists tend to focus on how individuals act in social situations, and how they are influenced by social processes. Sometimes, the focus is on how the individual is affected by others (Krueger Hicks & McGue 2001) what is called social influence. Social influence can include direct influences, like group decision making, as well as indirect influences, like imagining how friends would react to a particular situation.

In other cases, social psychologists study the cognitive processes that we use in understanding ourselves and others, called social cognition. Stereotyping and attitude change are examples of social cognitive processes (Bauch 2001). While one might imagine that social cognition is simply a sub-area of the Cognitive Approach, in fact, the behaviors related to social cognition can be explained from a variety of approaches--for example, stereotyping can be discussed by the Biological Approach in terms of evolutionary processes.

The Overture includes the song "Maria," changed from "Somewhere" in the stage version. (The overture is often eliminated in the stage productions.) Music was added extending "The Prologue", and so the actual dancing of the Jets evolves slowly from other physical movement such as the basketball shots. (On stage, the dancing begins almost immediately.) The change most often discussed and debated is the switching of "Gee, Officer Krupke" and "Cool". Apparently a song as jolly as Krupke was considered incompatible to the mood created ...