11.1 What Is Social Psychology’s Focus?

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LOQ LearningObjectiveQuestion

11-1 What are three main focuses of social psychology?

social psychology the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

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 12) study the personal traits and processes that explain why different people 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 the same person may act differently in different situations. (Might Willems’ jailer have released him if the circumstances had been different?)