Garden City High School Social Exchange Theory

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It’s very well known that all humans love to interact with others and make new relationships throughout their lives. There’s different types of relationships that are created such as family, friends, school, romance, sexual, and work. These relationships all have a benefit factor to them and a reason why these relationships are created. This all follows under the social exchange theory where every relationship has a rewarding system based on the behavior of a person. The social exchange theory best explains society unlike the other theories simply because the social exchange theory perfectly describes the behavior humans create when interacting with their relationships such as marriage, friends, and school.
Marriage is one of the strongest …show more content…

In other words, in Garden City High School when two people start to form a friendship there’s hardly any reward or cost simply because no one is expecting anything. Although, as time passes by the two people then being to demonstrate the social exchange theory as they are now putting in costs and rewards. Person A is now driving Person B to school despite having to spend more money on gas, but Person B buys Person A McDonald’s as a reward. While the two people interact and keep their behavior the same it won’t be until Person A becomes tired of McDonald’s and wish for a better quality of reward. The relationship then starts to have a struggle as Person A believes they’re putting too much cost and receiving no benefit while Person B is happy as they’re putting in no cost and receiving benefit. It won’t be long till Person A tries to get a different reward or stop giving rides since the benefit has lost value over time. Just like any relationships, friendships do have their fallouts as people end friendships when there’s nothing to benefit from it like in scenarios where a friend becomes too greedy or a friend stops caring for other people. These scenarios happen because there’s no reward or value in them to point where people just lose interest in …show more content…

In fact, at Garden City High School or GCHS many students will focus on out-of-state colleges as it can give them bigger opportunities, yet a downside is that an out-of-state college requires a high GPA or a top rank in the class. The downside will only encourage students to work harder in their academics in order to reach the reward even if it means less time with their social lives, however the hard work of the students will be paid off when they get accepted at the out-of-state college. Another example is when students at GCHS pick the activities they want to join by determining the reward the activity will bring them in particular questions such as: will this activity look good on my college application or will this activity give me a lot of medals. In GCHS, students are consistently applying the social exchange theory to their lives and society as they’re questioning things such as activities, classes, and colleges by trying to see if those things are going to give them a

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