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CHAPTER 1 OUTLINE
I. What is Social Psychology?
A. Social influence is at the heart of social psychology.
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Other people can influence our behavior through direct attempts at persuasion or more indirectly
through their presence and the transmission of cultural values.
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Social psychologists take an expanded view of social influence to include not just behavior but
thoughts and feelings as well.
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Social psychology is defined as the scientific study of the way that the thoughts, feelings, and
actions of people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
B. The Power of Social Interpretation
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Social psychology is distinct from other social sciences because of its emphasis upon construals—
the way people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world.
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Social psychology is also distinct because it is an experimentally based science.
C. How Else Can We Understand Social Influence?
1. Journalists, instant experts, and social critics
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Common sense explanations such as those offered by journalists are
known as folk wisdom.
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Folk wisdom may be contradictory and provides no way of
determining correctness.
2. Philosophy
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Social psychology differs from philosophy because it is empirical.
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Educated guesses, or hypotheses, are tested in well-designed experiments to discern the
situations that would result in one outcome or another.
D. Social Psychology Compared with Personality Psychology
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Personality psychology focuses on individual differences in human behavior (those aspects of
people’s personalities that make them different from other people), while social psychology focuses
more on how the social situation affects people similarly.
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Social psychologists believe that explaining behavior primarily in terms of personality factors can
be superficial because it leads to a serious underestimation of the role played by social influence. The
fact that most people fail to take the situation into account has a profound impact on how people
relate to one another.
E. Social Psychology Compared with Sociology
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Social psychology joins other social science disciplines in its focus on social behavior. Social
psychology differs from these other disciplines in its level of analysis: the individual in the context of
a social situation.
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Sociology is concerned with social class, social structure, and social institutions. Although
sociology and social psychology share areas of interest, sociology, rather than looking at the
individual, is interested in a society or group.
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Table 1.1 (page 14) depicts comparisons between social psychology and closely-related fields of
personality psychology and sociology.
