SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICALLY

Social Psychologically

Social Psychologically

Social psychology is the scientific study of how we affect each other by anything from what we say or do, to the simple act of our presence. From this descriptions it is clear how social psychology is often seen to overlap with sociology and indeed explains why many of its roots are there. Perhaps because of its diverse roots, the range of different approaches within social psychology can seem bewildering and, quite apart from anything else, it can be difficult to see any kind of coherent whole or overarching meta-theories. In order to evaluate whether social psychology might benefit from a more integrated approach it is useful to evaluate where that integration is occurring and whether it is producing meaningful knowledge.

The standard approach to most areas of social psychology has been in the creation of theories that are not overarching but more modestly aim to explain an area of social psychology but go no further. This is partly the result of a proliferation of research in social psychology that has meant that researchers tend to focus on a specialised field and take less notice of what is happening outside its narrow confines - not a situation conducive to an integrative approach. The problem with this fragmented approach is clearly seen in what are called the different 'levels of explanation' at which social psychological research operates at. The three levels are intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup and the research has tended to concentrate on one of these levels without integrating them together. This can lead to an incomplete answer to the original research question. Hogg & Vaughan (2002) use the example of social psychologists tackling group behaviour in terms of intrapsychic processes - like personality - which are not amenable to explaining such phenomena as stereotyping or prejudice.

Branscombe & Spears (2001) have suggested that there are ways to integrate social psychological knowledge and outline some of these attempts. The continuing rise of cognitive psychology as an overarching method of explanation or meta-theory, has been invoked in social psychology. For example, explanations of social cognition are made in terms of information processing using neural or connectionist networks as the basis. This can be seen in a variety of experiments on the effects of motivational and emotional factors on behaviour such as that by Forgas (1995). Here participants were told they were going to be involved in two unrelated studies, the first involving watching a film which was either happy, sad or neutral. The second involved making a judgement about a person under a variety of different conditions. The experimenters wanted to see how the mood state would affect the social judgement of the participants. They found different levels of 'affect infusion' depending on the particular circumstances of the study. The main criticism of this type of formulation of motivational and emotional factors as somehow 'add-on' or extra factors that then modify 'normal behaviour' is that it rather isolates these factors rather than integrating them with the perception and evaluation of ...