SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, DEFINITION, DYNAMICS AND PRINCIPLES
The purpose of this paper is to present a general overview of the field of social psychology. To this end, the paper presents a general definition of the field and discusses its basic dynamics; this is followed by a discussion of some of the discipline's key principles (assumptions and postulates about its areas of study and how to investigate these areas). The final section of this paper delineates and then discusses what I feel I have personally learned from taking this course in social psychology.
In its essence, social psychology can be defined as the systematic study of social behavior (Feldman, 1998). In other words, social psychology is the scientific study of how human behavior, thought and emotion is affected by the real or imagined presence of other people. This very broad definition actually encompasses a wide range of phenomena, including: how people form attitudes, how people attempt to persuade and are persuaded by others, how people form close relationships, why people help or harm each other, and how people understand each other and themselves.
Crano and Messe (1992) have noted that because of the broad scope of the field of social psychology, the discipline should be thought of as a sort of hybrid sharing common interests and methods with other social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology. Given that social psychology shares its field of interest and methods with so many other social sciences, a key question that needs to be asked in order to fully understand the nature of the field is: What are those distinctive dynamics associated with the field and its approach to these common interests?
In part, the just stated question has been answered by Taylor, Peplau and Sears (1997) who point out that, at the simplest level, with the exception of psychology, the dynamics associated with the other social...