Characterizing Social Psychology

People have always sought explanations for human behavior. Stories in the form of myths, legends, parables, and folk wisdom have been passed from one generation to the next to explain why people do what they do and to communicate what is acceptable and what is not. Social psychologists go beyond folk wisdom and try to establish a scientific basis for understanding human behavior. Social psychology can be defined as the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations.

Why do people stereotype others? Why do people risk their lives to help others? Why do some marriages flourish and others fail? How do orderly crowds turn into violent mobs? What aspects of our neighborhood may lead us to live long lives or die young? These sorts of questions lie at the heart of social psychology. In this book, you’ll read about careful research that has provided at least partial answers to such questions. Some of the answers probably won’t surprise you. For example, we tend to like people who like us, and the people we like generally have attitudes and interests that are similar to ours. When findings reflect our intuitions and folk wisdom, social psychologists go further, seeking to discover what explains the phenomenon in question. In contrast, other answers have been so counterintuitive that they surprised even the social psychologists who conducted the research. As you will see throughout this book, many of our most strongly held folk theories or intuitions fail to give complete answers to enduring questions about our lives, and others are just plain wrong. Social psychologists test these intuitions by devising studies and crafting experiments that reveal the causes of behavior in social situations.

Social psychologists study situations in which people influence one another as well as the ways people respond to attempts to influence them. Social psychologists are also interested in how people make sense of their world—how they decide what and whom to believe; how they understand the motives, personalities, and abilities of other people; and how they explain the events occurring around them. Social psychologists apply their knowledge to important questions: how to reduce stereotyping and prejudice in the classroom and workplace; how to combat the spread of disinformation on the internet; how to make eyewitness testimony more reliable; how physicians can best use diverse sources of information to make a correct diagnosis; what goes wrong in airplane cockpits when there is an accident or near accident; and how businesses, governments, and individuals can make better decisions.

We hope that in reading this book, you will arrive at a greater understanding of yourself and others. You will gain insights that you can apply in your education, your career, and your relationships. We hope that your reasoning and the quality of your life will improve accordingly.