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New knowledge can be both liberating and useful. It broadens our appreciation of our life experiences and gives us more information for better decisions. However, such newfound knowledge also comes at a cost. This theme is central to the classic sci-fi film The Matrix (Silver et al., 1999). In the film, the prophet Morpheus offers the protagonist, Neo, the choice between a blue pill and a red pill. If Neo takes the blue pill, he will stay inside a safe and familiar world, a computer program created for him that is the only reality he has ever known. But if he takes the red pill, Neo will be pulled out of that virtual reality into a more authentic and complex view of himself and the world around him.

Learning about social psychology will be like swallowing that red pill. As a blue-piller, you live day to day, absorbed in a world of classes, jobs, relationships, sports, parties, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. When you think of the future, perhaps you’re thinking about grad school or starting your career. Maybe you’re involved in student government or environmentalism, or supporting the troops, or helping fight poverty. This is the “programmed” world in which we all live, established by our culture and internalized by us through the socialization process. Though each of us plays a unique role within this reality, we’re both part of it and constrained by it. Social psychology, like the red pill, can take you outside the ordinary reality you live in to a more enlightened and sometimes more disturbing vantage point, one that reveals that each of us is a complex but fragile and vulnerable animal with certain propensities and capacities, striving to satisfy basic needs and desires within the cultural matrix. Although no one can live for long outside the comfort of their culturally constructed reality, by taking an occasional foray beyond it, we can better comprehend many of the events we care about within the ordinary reality in which we generally reside.

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Social psychology is the scientific study of the causes and consequences of people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions regarding themselves and other people. It is a set of concepts and discoveries that can fundamentally expand and enrich your understanding of yourself, of those in your social sphere, and of events in the world around you. In this first chapter, we’ll start with the historic origins of the field and some broad perspectives and core assumptions social psychologists utilize to study human behavior in a social context. We’ll then consider the ways in which all of us, as intuitive scientists, flip through our encyclopedic knowledge of culture to draw inferences about human behavior. However, because this intuitive approach can be limited and biased, we’ll turn to the discerning eye and sharp tools of science to isolate and understand human behavior.