Social psychology

• Social Psychology is the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations.
• People are influenced by others, make decisions, infer about others' attitudes and personalities, are influenced by situational variables, and make sense of their world.
• Personality psychology stresses individual differences in behavior.
• Cognitive psychology is the study of how people think about, perceive, and remember aspects of the world.
• Sociology is the study of behavior of people in the aggregate, or population level issues.
• Proximal factors exist in the here-and-now or immediately precede what the individual does.
• Distal factors are more removed in time from a given context or episode.
• The Power of The Situation is a classic issue in social psychology: is behavior due to individual differences (personality) or situational influences?
• Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory states that people and their surroundings and conditions depend closely on each other, and that a 'field' refers to all aspects of individuals in relationship with their surroundings and conditions; those aspects that apparently influence the particular behaviours and developments of concern; at a particular point in time.
• Altruism in psychology, based on much research, is that people often think about, perceive, or 'construe' the same stimulus in different ways.
• Interpreting Reality is crucial in understanding behavior in a given situation, as it involves understanding how an individual construes the situation.
• Gestalt Psychology, based on the German word, Gestalt, meaning “form”, stresses the fact that objects are perceived not by means of some automatic registering device but by active, usually unconscious, interpretation of what the object represents as a whole.
• Darwin assumed that Natural Selection, an evolutionary process that operates to mold animals and plants such that traits that enhance the probability of survival and reproduction are passed on to subsequent generations, is just as important and the same for behavioral propensities as they are for biological characteristics.
• Human Universals are commonalities in human behavior that are assumed to be due to adaptation or natural selection.
• Group Living, Language, and Theory of Mind are aspects of human behavior that are assumed to be due to adaptation or natural selection.
• Parental Investment Theory of Mind is the understanding that other people have beliefs and desires.
• The way things are, are the way they should be.
• Culture and Human Behavior: How We Are Different includes cultural differences in self-definition, qualifications to these distinctions, and cultural differences in theory of mind.