Social Psychology And Human Nature

This textbook is simultaneously an expression of love and rebellion. The love is our feeling toward our field. We followed different paths into social psychology, but over the years we have developed an affectionate appreciation for it. We agreed to write this textbook partly because we thought we could contribute to the field by covering what we love about it. The process of writing strengthened those positive feelings, by helping us see the remarkably diverse and creative work that our fellow psychologists have produced over the past several decades. We are also both very active social psychological researchers and teachers. We love doing social psychology research, and we love teaching students about the field of social psychology.The rebellion part begins with the title. Maybe social psychology has sold itself short by clinging to the message “it’s all about situations!” We think it’s partly about situations, but to us social psychology is very much about people. We think students sign up for social psychology courses because they want to learn about people. And we think social psychologists actually have plenty to tell them about people-hence the “human nature” part of our title.In other words, we are rebelling against the old dogma that social psychology’s truth requires treating people as blank slates who just respond to situations. Instead, we see people as highly complex, exquisitely designed, and variously inclined cultural animals who respond to situations. Our textbook will tell students plenty about the power of situations, but it also seeks to tell them about the people in those situations.To us, the most exciting aspect of this project has been the attempt to “put the person back together,” in the phrase that got us started on the book. We believe that social psychology can offer a remarkably new, coherent, and accurate vision of human nature.In fact, this new vision of human nature was central to the story behind the book.Both of us had been approached many times by various publishers about possibly writing a social psychology textbook, and both of us had repeatedly brushed them off as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Back then we thought that writing a textbook sounded like a tedious, uncreative set of chores requiring reading and describing every part of the field, regardless of how interesting. Both of us loathe anything that is boring.The turning point came when one of us spent a year at an interdisciplinary institute and embraced the task of trying to package what social psychology has learned that could be useful to other fields. Scholars in those fields mostly want to know about people and why they act as they do. The response to this took the form of a book for general audiences called The Cultural Animal,’ but the realization slowly dawned that this new, more integrated understanding of the human being might provide a powerful basis for a social psychology textbook.We have used many different textbooks in our own social psychology courses.Many of them are quite good. One dissatisfaction with them, however, and indeed one that we have heard echoed by many other instructors and students, is that they end up being just narrative lists of findings grouped by topic, rather like a handbook or encyclopedia. We wanted more. We wanted an integrated, coherent vision. And now we had a basis in the form of a new understanding of human nature that put together the results of thousands of social psychology studies. So this time when publishers asked about writing a textbook, we thought it over. And then we decided to do it