Theoretical Perspectives That Define Social Psychology

Social psychology and personality psychology both came into fruition around the same time – the 1920’s and 1930’s. Needless

The Sociocultural perspective of psychology that focuses on the different behaviors that exist between the different cultures and how culture can affect one 's behavior. The evolutionary perspective of psychology envelops different aspects of evolutionary traits we obtain and how they affect our lives. This includes natural selection, evolution, and adaptation and seeing how they affect our mental processes. The Humanistic perspective approaches to understanding human nature and emphasizes self-actualization and free will in humans.

Social psychology is a subfield discipline of psychology that concentrates on how an individual or group of individuals feel, react and think based on certain conditions or situations they are involved in. It is an empirical science which main objective is to interpret and rationalize the relationship between the thoughts, attitudes and emotions of a person or group of people which can be predisposed by the indirect, illusionary or be mere presence of other person or group of person through evaluating and endeavoring to validate such hypotheses. Social psychologists do not rely on folk wisdom which can be influenced by skewed interpretations as well as subjective thoughts and opinions. Instead, social psychologists

Personhood is a moral concept introduced by Kitwood (1997), suggesting that the status of human beings are influenced by relationships formed with others in a social context. According to this definition, relationships have a tremendous impact on personhood. A weakened personhood results from disrespect, ignorance, isolation, and invalidation. On the contrary, through one’s presence, respect, trust, and communication, personhood is reinforced.

Social psychology is an empirical science that studies how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. This field focuses on how individuals view and affect one another. Social psychology also produces the idea of construals which represent how a person perceives, comprehends or interprets the environment. Construals introduce the idea that people want to make themselves look good to others and they want to be seen as right. It is also said that the social setting in which people interact impacts behavior, which brings up the idea of behaviorism. Behaviorism is the idea that behavior is a function of the person and the environment.

Social psychology studies individuals in their social contexts. It is a diverse discipline made up of many theoretical perspectives and variety of different methods are used in social psychological research.

According to our text, social psychology is a science that studies the impact of our

variety of topics. Social psychologists study a variety of topics, including views of the self,

There were three questions asked at the start of this paper. What is Social Psychology all about? Why is the study of it so important? Is there truly a purpose or benefit from the findings of the studies? Social Psychology is the study of attitude, behavior, and interactions of individuals within a group setting. You may have heard the saying "for every action, there is a reaction," Social Psychologists observe and interpret behaviors in effort to provide further explanation of cause and effect. It is thru the studies of Social Psychology we can learn how to get into the cause and begin to foresee patterns of reactions. A simple yet sophisticated theory.

Huffman (2012) explains that social psychology is a subject which, “studies how other people influence our individual thoughts, feelings and actions” (p. 567). Understanding the way people act around others can be important when society is faced with challenges, and can even help others learn how to reduce conflict with each other.

Social Psychology leads us to understand the behavior of an individual person when he or she is in a social setting. Social psychology is fairly new to the world of psychology, with first experiments taking place in the late 1800’s and first text recorded in the early 1900’s. Behavior is typically determined by a reaction to stimuli, therefore it seems to be influenced by environment. Social psychology examines how much human behavior may be influenced by other people. In social psychology, behavior of an individual is observed in the company of other people, and how this behavior

Personality is defined as an individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking1. In psychology, personality is utilized to sum up all the ways of an individual’s thinking, feeling and acting that based on the environment and experience. Various personality theories exist and are categorized into four major perspectives—Psychoanalytic, Humanistic, Social Cognitive and trait perspective. These four major perspectives on personality help to describe the numerous patterns in each individual’s personality.

Psychology can be defined as the systematic study of mental processes, couple with behaviors, and experiences (Kalat, 2011). There are many ways in examining, mental processes and behaviors among people, and therefore psychologist uses different perspectives to understand how human beings, think, act, and behave. Some psychologist uses one perspective to analyze behaviors, and other uses a multidimensional approach. Carter & Seifert (2013) identified 7 major perspectives that are used to study people’s behavior, and mental processes. These perspectives are the biological, evolutionary, psychodynamic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, and the sociocultural perspective.

This essay will give detailed descriptions of the behaviourist and cognitive perspectives in psychology and evaluate their key assumptions. The strengths and limitations of each perspective will be discussed along with an evaluation of their applications to contemporary issues in psychology. Finally there will be an analysis of the similarities and differences between each perspective and a conclusion.

Social psychology is the understanding of an individual’s behavior in a social context. It is the scientific field that focuses on the nature and causes of that individual’s behavior in social situations. It looks at the human behavior that has been influenced by others and in the social context with which it occurred. Social psychology pays attention to how feelings, thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and goals are constructed and how these factors influence our behavior and interactions with others. This paper will examine the principles of social psychology and help us to