The Field of Social Psychology

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 p

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social situations. Principles of Social Psychology The principles or fundamental assumptions and postulates of the field of social psychology have been discussed by several authors (e.g., (Alcock, Carment & Sadava, 1998; Brewer & Crano, 1994; Kenrick, Neuberg & Cialdini, 1999). Certainly one of the most fundamental of these is that the scientific method or empirical method is the proper way to determine answers to the questions that comprise the discipline; and while this may seem quite obvious these days, Brewer and Crano (1994) report that this basic principle was once not so thoroughly entrenched in the perspective of the basic discipline. According to McDonald and Hartsough (1983) another basic principle of social psychology is its applied focus which is to say that the discipline attempts to develop theory and research that is central to solving the various social problems and conflicts experienced by people in their every day lives. In other words, the discipline does not attempt to obtain knowledge for knowledge's sake so much as to obtain knowledge that people can apply to their lives and so improve their social situations. In the definition section of social psychology it was noted that the level of analysis used i

Category: Psychology - T