The Influence Of Social Psychology

Social psychology can be defined as social influence. Such influence could impact the beliefs, values, behavior or feelings of others. People influence others or are influenced by them. Professional social psychologists study and conduct research and experiments to further understand the nature of this influence and to understand the human social behavior. Unlike professional social psychologists, armature social psychologists - and people as a whole – tend to think they comprehend, predict or speculate how people would act or behave as they overestimate their power of prediction; the hindsight bias. While in fact, their hypotheses of most basic and simple social experiences’ outcomes are wrong. Similarly, in the experiment where experimenters found that people tend to desire more the forbidden behavior after being severely threatened, while armature social psychologists thought they would, reasonably enough, that subjects wouldn’t engage in that forbidden behavior. Therefore, professional social psychologists can based upon evidence and detailed data taken from maintained and controlled experiment draw more precise conclusions and analysis of human social behavior and how influence contributed to that behavior. Social psychology showed with concrete evidence that people who act crazy are not necessarily crazy. People when put in intense situations and undergo social influence that might trigger an abnormal behavior were merely responding to that influence.

Social psychology assists in understanding that situational variables – with the impact of dispositional view - can change behavior drastically and allow us to know how it happened and why it happened.