What Is Social Psychology’s Focus?

12-1 What are three main focuses of social psychology?

AN ETCHING OF DIRK WILLEMS BY DUTCH ARTIST JAN LUYKEN (from The Martyrs Mirror, 1685)

Mennonite Library and Archives/Bethel College

Social psychologists use scientific methods to study how we think about, influence, and relate to one another. When the unexpected occurs, we want to understand why people act as they do. Personality psychologists (Chapter 11) study the personal traits and processes that explain why we as individuals may act differently in a given situation. (Would you have acted as Willems did, helping the jailer out of the icy water?) Social psychologists study the social forces that explain why people act differently in different situations. (Might Willems’ jailer have released him if the circumstances had been different?)