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• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Individual Differences
• Physiological Psychology
• Social Psychology

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Home > Social Psychology

Social Psychology

Social psychology (or the social approach) is interested in studying individuals in a social context, such as family, friends, institutions, and wider society. Social behaviour may involve activity within a group or between groups.

One of the debates in social psychology is whether an individual's behaviour is a result of their personality or their social context.

As you will see from looking at the three core studies in this section of the course, the authors of the studies emphasise the importance of the social context in shaping behaviour. The social influence which the Milgram study (1963) is concerned with is the demands of an authority figure. The study by Reicher and Haslam (2006) demonstrates the importance of how social identity influences our behaviour. The field experiment carried out by Piliavin, Rodin and Piliavin (1969) examines the social influences on the decisions we make about whether we help people in emergency situations.

 

Strengths and weaknesses of the social approach