Nature and scope of social psychology lecture 2

Nature and scope of social psychology by M. Abdullah

1. NATURE AND SCOPE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Lecture 2

2. Social psychology encompasses social situational influence on psychological phenomena, personal construction of those situations, and the mutual influence of the person/situation interaction. Therefore, the scope is largely defined by the limits of what is a “(social) situation”.

3. This situation could be considered the relative influence of real or imagined others. It could also be ecological influences which include cultural products, community layout, institutional climate, built spaces, discourses, etc. Suffice it to say the scope can be expansive.

4. A couple limiting factors should be noted. The first is that social psychology is first and foremost interested in measurement at the individual level. This is primarily what differentiates it from Sociology, even though both are interested in many of the same social influences and sometimes group level data can be of interest to social psych studies. It’s tough to draw psychological conclusions without measuring individual responses.

5. Second, social psych has been historically defined by the methodology it uses as much as the phenomena it considers. Experimental studies are typically the gold standard for social psychologists, so to the degree the phenomena can be subject to experimental design, that is a good indicator of social psychology. Third , social and personality psychology are mentioned in the same breath much of the time. What differentiates the two is personality psych’s emphasis on stable traits that make people individually different or distinct from one another.

6. Social psych emphasizes the dynamism of human experience, and how situations/subjective construal's of the situations tend to shape outcomes far more than stable personality traits.

7. Social psychology is in essence the examination of social phenomena and their impact on individual and group behavior, attitudes, cultures, structures. Social psychology has, by definition, a very wide remit and right now I cannot think of anything it wouldn’t include.

8. Social psychology, as the writer conceives it, studies the psychic planes and currents that come into existence among men in consequence of their association. It seeks to understand and account for those uniformities in feeling, belief, or volition- and hence in action-which are due to the interaction of human beings, i . e., to social causes. No two persons have just the same endowment.

9. Looking at their heredity we should expect people to be far more dissimilar and individual than we actually find them to be. The aligning power of association triumphs over diversity of temperament and experience. There ought to be as many religious creeds as there are human beings; but we find people ranged under a few great religions. It is the same in respect to dress, diet, pastimes, or moral ideas. The individuality each as received from the hand of nature is largely effaced, and we find people gathered into great planes of uniformity.

10. Social psychology differs from sociology proper in that the former considers planes and currents, the latter groups and structures.2 Their interests bring men into co-operation or conflict. Social psychology pays no attention to the non-psychic parallelisms among human being Social psychology ignores uniformities arising directly or indirectly out of race endowment-negro volubility, gipsy nomadic etc., Social psychology deals only with uniformities due to social causes, i.e ., to mental contacts or interaction.

11. Social psychology seeks to enlarge our knowledge of society by explaining how so many planes in feeling, belief, or purpose have established themselves among men and supplied a basis for their groupings, their co-operations, and their conflict Social psychology falls into two very unequal divisions, viz., social ascendancy and individual ascendancy, the determination of the one by the many and the determination of the many by the one; the molding of the ordinary person by his social environment and the molding of the social environment by the extraordinary person

12. THANK YOU