preview

The Help of Social Psychological Essay

Best Essays
There are many different approaches in psychology that seeks to explain behaviour through various prospective but each approach differs in explaining the cause or causes of behaviours in a person or groups. For instance, Freud’s Psychoanalytic approach argues that human behaviour is the cause of a person’s unconscious thoughts, conflicts between internal drives and childhood experiences whilst on the other hand, Behaviourist approach argues that all human behaviours are learnt through the process of operant and classical conditioning or in other words, behaviour arises as a response to conditioning. Social psychological approach argues that the influences of other people can affect human behaviour. Many approaches in psychology focus on…show more content…
Social psychology emerges from the discipline of sociology which deals with the external causes of behaviour (the effect of the social environment on behaviour), and psychology which deal with the internal causes of behaviour (personality, mental and thought processes etc.) to form its own distinct scientific discipline in psychology that looks at both external and internal factors as a cause of human behaviour. Its origins can be traced back to the mid-19th century when the idea of studying social processes in a scientific manner was put forward by French thinker Auguste Comte (1835); his ideas did set the stage for many theories and experiment to follow in the field of social science and ever since, there has been a wide variety of scientific research carried out by social psychologist to examine the many different dynamics behind certain types of human behaviour in social situations (Cited in Crisp & Turner 2010 : Trinity.edu, 2013).
This approach studies people in group social situations to help them better understand how the influences of others affect human social behaviours; they argue that human behaviour is a function of a person’s character and their environment (Deutsch & Krauss, 1965). Social psychologist tries to understand how the actual or implied presence of others influences our
Get Access