Social Psychology

Assignment: Social Psychology Definition

PSY/400

February 4, 2013

Social Psychology is a young branch of psychology that emerged barely a century ago. It is on the verge of sociology but keeps grounded in psychology. This paper will cover the definition of social psychology, how social psychology differs from other branches of psychology, the different types of research conducted in social psychology.

What is Social Psychology?

According to Myers (2010), the definition of social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. Social psychology could be described as a hybrid between clinical psychology and sociology because if focuses on people as individuals and experimentation; whereas sociology studies people in groups and societies and clinical psychology focuses on experiments in a laboratory setting (Myers, 2010). There are seven central ideas explored in social psychology:

we construct our own reality, our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous, attitudes shape, and are shaped by behavior, social influences shape behavior, dispositions shape behavior, social behavior is also biological behavior, and feelings and actions toward people are sometimes negative and sometimes positive. (Myers, 2010, p. 6) The way we construct our own reality is through the beliefs and values that we have and how we understand it. Because it has been discovered that we know more than we know in our subconscious mind, our intuitions can lead us in both a good and bad directions. These intuitions should be used with commonsense to avoid as much disaster as possible throughout life. A person’s attitude toward a situation will influence how he or she acts. For example, if a person sees the punishment he received as unfair, he may try to plot revenge; whereas a person who saw the punishment fair or even generous may show gratitude and want to make the situation right. The attitude a person has may have been...