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