Definition of Social Psychology

Definition of Social Psychology

When gathering information about the so-called social psychology , one can notice that this discipline began to be developed at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. It is a branch of psychology that revolves around the assumption that there are psychological processes that determine the way society works and the way in which social interaction takes place. These social processes are those that delineate the characteristics of human psychology.

Social psychology examines the mutual determination between an individual and his social environment. Thus, this scienceinvestigates the social features of behavior and mental functioning.

For the vast majority of experts and scholars of Social Psychology, without a doubt, the father or one of the ancestors of the same is the French sociologist Auguste Comte. A figure that, among other things, raised what was called positive moral and that focused both on what was the role of man in society and culture and what are the biological foundations of it in terms of conduct.

However, it is also established in that category of antecedent and pioneer of this discipline that occupies to us Karl Max, a German intellectual, who raised a series of elements that soon would be fundamental in that one. In particular, he developed concepts referring to the influences that the individual has both cultural and institutional, material or technical.

To all this we can add that in particular those who consider themselves as builders of this Social Psychology are three Americans: George H. Mead, Floyd Henry Allport and Kurt Lewin, who was Polish but ended up becoming an American citizen.

A psychologist this last one that stands out for being the founder of the so-called Modern Social Psychology, for contributing in a palpable and remarkable way to what is the development of Gestalt Psychology (current of Modern Psychology) and for creating what is known with the name of Field Theory.

A theory that exposes, among other things, that it is something impossible to try to know and understand the behavior of man outside of what is his environment.

Different approaches can be mentioned within social psychology, such as psychoanalysis , behaviorism , postmodern psychology and the perspective of groups .

Psychoanalysis understands social psychology as the branch that examines the collective drives and repressions , which have their origin in the interior of the individual unconscious to condition the collective and influence the social.

Behaviorism, on the other hand, considers social psychology as the study of social influence , so it focuses its efforts on observing and analyzing the behavior of the subject with respect to the influence of the environment or of others.

For postmodern psychology, on the other hand, social psychology is responsible for analyzing the components that intervene in diversity and social fragmentation .

Finally, according to the perspective of the groups, each set of individuals constitutes a unit of analysis with its own identity. Therefore, social psychology studies human groups as an intermediate point between the social and depersonalized and between the individual and particular .