Social psychology

Social psychology is the methodical study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings.

Its roots lie in the late nineteenth century, when psychology began to ask concrete questions about collective conduct. Wilhelm Wundt promoted a psychology of peoples, while in France Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde studied crowds, imitation, and public opinion. In the United States, Norman Triplett carried out one of the first published experiments in the field around 1898, on social facilitation. Floyd Allport defined the discipline as the experimental study of social behavior in the 1920s, and after psychologists from the Gestalt tradition fled Nazi Germany, figures such as Kurt Lewin gave the field its own identity apart from behaviorism and psychoanalysis.

Social psychologists usually explain behavior as the result of the relationship between a person's mental states and the social situations they face. Lewin summed up this idea in a formula in which behavior depends on both the person and the environment. Classic topics include attitudes, persuasion, the attribution of causes to one's own and others' behavior, cognitive dissonance, prejudice, and aggression. A simple example: someone may value the environment and still not recycle a bottle on a particular day because the situation makes it difficult. Context can weigh as heavily as attitude.

The discipline sits between psychology and sociology. Sociology often works on large scales, with social structures, while social psychology tends to focus on the individual and on specific situations, relying frequently on laboratory experiments. The tension between these approaches persists, as does a difference in emphasis between American researchers, who have traditionally focused on the individual, and European ones, who have paid more attention to the group.

Today the field includes pluralistic and multicultural perspectives, stricter ethical standards for experimentation, and growing attention to phenomena such as social cognition, identity, and the effects of collective crises. In Latin America, from the 1960s, authors such as Enrique Pichon-Rivière developed a social psychology centered on bonds, groups, and institutions, showing that the discipline admits very different readings.