The answer to the question guiding this section is really quite simple – observation. A social psychologist may investigate whether an individual helped another person due to a situational or personal factor, while a personality psychologist would examine whether a certain personality type is more likely to make situational or dispositional attributions or look for traits that govern helping behavior.ġ.1.2. Simply, personality psychology is the scientific study of individual differences in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and how these come together as a whole. Personality and social psychology go hand-in-hand and so we should define personality psychology too. In contrast, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Division 8 of the American Psychological Association SPSP) defines social psychology as the “scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.” The study of social psychology occurs in a social context meaning the individual as they relate to others and is affected by others. According to the American Sociological Association ( ), sociology is a social science which involves studying the social lives of people, groups, and societies studying our behavior as social beings scientifically investigating social aggregations and is “an overarching unification of all studies of humankind, including history, psychology, and economics.” The latter is the focus of the field called sociology, or the study of society or groups, both large and small. Our starting point is on the person, and not society. Social psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes as they relate to how people interact with, or relate to, others. Really, both forms of the word are useful for the discussion to come in this textbook. Another form of the word implies a desire to be around people such as being a social butterfly. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others” ( ). According to Oxford Dictionaries online, social is defined as relating to society or its organization. What is going on in the brain to control the movement of our arms and legs when running downfield to catch the game winning touchdown, what affects the words we choose to say when madly in love, how do we interpret an event as benign or a threat when a loud sound is heard, and what makes an individual view another group in less than favorable terms? These are just a few of the questions that we ask as psychologists. Psychology desires to not only understand why people engage in the behavior that they do, but also how. Second, it is the study of behavior and mental processes. We will discuss this in more detail in Module 2 so please just keep this in the back of your mind for now. Psychology utilizes the same scientific process and methods used by disciplines such as biology and chemistry. Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. We will tackle the latter, then the former, and then put it all together. Our discussion of social psychology will start by defining a few key terms, or what social and psychology mean separately.
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Outline the history of social psychology.Clarify similarities and differences between social psychology, personality psychology, and sociology.Connecting with Other Social Psychologists
1000 ways to die intro professional#
Finally, we will examine professional societies and journals as they relate to social psychology and share links to blogs and newsfeeds on current research in this subfield. We will then embark upon a historical journey to see where the field has come from and where it is going. In our first module we will examine the field of social psychology and how it relates to personality psychology and differs from sociology by clarifying the level of analysis and differences in methods used. Module 1: Introduction to Social Psychology