magazine issue 6 2007 / Issue 3

Five Social Psychology Essentials

• written by Dennis Fox

II. Imagining and Exploring Alternatives

The next step is imagining and exploring alternatives. The structure and purpose of the standard college classroom, the nature of work and family life, the forces that maintain national and global political and economic power – everything is up for discussion if we take social psychology’s subject matter seriously. If our world is neither optimal nor inevitable, then every course should spend time imagining a better one and exploring how we might achieve it. This means contemplating possibilities beyond the relatively minor reforms social psychologists typically suggest.

Half a century ago Abraham Maslow (1971) taught a course in Utopian Social Psychology. He described it as focused on “the empirical and realistic questions: How good a society does human nature permit? How good a human nature does society permit? What is possible and feasible? What is not?” (p. 203). That topic is at least as urgent today. What does social psychology’s knowledge base say about current societal arrangements? How could social psychologists expand that base to facilitate alternatives? In addition to its pedagogical benefits, this discussion might encourage students to challenge common justifications for an imperfect status quo and even, perhaps, work to make things better.

III: Understanding that Behavior has Multiple Interacting Causes

Social psychology’s landscape is important even if many of the details are not. We hope that when students try to understand aggression and competition, prejudice and obedience, they will remember that social behavior has many causes; that, because behavior reflects an interaction between person and setting, at least some of those causes are changeable; and that variation is inevitable, so that behavior is rarely completely predictable even when experimental manipulations reach statistical significance.

Students who know that behavior has multiple interacting causes are likely to remember Eliot Aronson’s “first law” noted in his classic text The Social Animal (2004): People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. Instead of dismissing as irrational suicide bombers in Iraq or repressive guards at Guantanamo Bay, they should wonder about the context that makes such behavior seem reasonable to those who carry it out. Perhaps even more important, when considering how public policy might be changed to reduce repressive and unjust behavior, they should wonder about the context that leads some to resist those changes and about how to facilitate positive change despite opposition. Raising the level of analysis toward the societal and global should be part of every social psychology course.

IV. Realizing the Centrality of Both Individuality and Community

An obvious connection among many of social psychology’s distinct topics is the tension between the individual and the community. Despite frequent mention of this link, however, textbooks increasingly de-emphasize group activity and emphasize its drawbacks as they narrow their gaze toward the interpersonal and intrapersonal. Aronson’s Social Animal, for example, doesn’t have a chapter squarely on group dynamics; group structure, the roles of group actors, and factors that make groups effective, satisfying, or cooperative appear in other chapters, but rarely as a core concern. In Social Psychology, David Myers (2002) adds in a postscript that groups have benefits as well, but his advice – “we had better choose our group influences wisely and intentionally” (p. 322) – reinforces the dangers. Importantly, community interaction beyond the small group is rarely considered.

The introductory course should emphasize how social psychology’s body of knowledge demonstrates the importance of both individuality and community and should consider more carefully how both might be enhanced. By assessing how competing political and philosophical perspectives attempt to balance the two, social psychology can encourage students to consider how those perspectives reflect competing empirical assumptions (Fox, 1985). The course should also consider whether social psychology’s inward turn can be explained, at least in part, by our era’s individualistic, entrepreneurial, competitive ethos. It should assess the societal implications of this decreased focus on how to create and maintain better functioning groups and communities.