What Is Social Psychology?

While psychology studies how people act, think and feel, those thoughts, actions, and
feelings are not isolated. They occur within a society. However, the way in which people's
actions, thoughts, and feelings manifest within that society can vary, causing a person to act
one way when they are alone versus another when they are around certain people or groups.
This is where social psychology comes into play, but what is social psychology, and why is it
important?

Social psychology, like psychology as such, studies how people act, think, and feel,
but it does so within the context of society. Social psychologists aim to understand how
people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors manifest and change based on real or imagined
interactions with others. For example, Taylor is a seventeen-year-old high school girl who
has a very close group of friends. They party and gossip and enjoy going to concerts together.
However, Taylor is also part of a Christian family that upholds specific values and morals.
While she may swear and drink around her friends, she changes that behavior when she is
with her family and in her church community, ensuring she is wearing appropriate clothing
and using appropriate language. In this case, social psychologists would ask why those shifts
occur, as the social psychology definition focuses on changes within the mind, body, and
subsequent behaviors.

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Comparing Social Psychology to Related Disciplines

Social psychology is often confused with folk wisdom, personality psychology, and
sociology. Unlike folk wisdom, which relies on anecdotal observations and subjective
interpretation, social psychology employs scientific methods and empirical study.
Researchers do not make assumptions about how people behave; they devise and carry out
experiments that help point out relationships between different variables.

Personality psychology focuses on individual traits, characteristics, and thoughts.

Social psychology is focused on situations. Social psychologists are interested in the impact
that the social environment and group interactions have on attitudes and behaviors.

Finally, it is important to distinguish between social psychology and sociology. While

there are many similarities between the two, sociology tends to look at social behavior and
influences at a very broad-based level. Sociologists are interested in the institutions and
cultures that influence how people behave.

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Western History of Social Psychology

Early Western psychology was regarded as the study of the soul (in the Christian sense of the
term). Until the middle of the nineteenth century, psychology was widely regarded as a
branch of philosophy, and was heavily influenced by the works of René Descartes (1596-
1650).

Franz Anton Mesmer

The philosophers of the British Empiricist and Associationist schools had a profound
impact on the later course of experimental psychology. John Locke's An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1689), George Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710), and David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)
were particularly influential, as were David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749) and John
Stuart Mill's A System of Logic (1843). Also notable was the work of some
Continental Rationalist philosophers, especially Baruch Spinoza's On the Improvement of the
Understanding (1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's New Essays on Human
Understanding (completed 1705, published 1765).

Also influential on the emerging discipline of psychology were debates surrounding

the efficacy of Mesmerism (hypnosis) and the value of phrenology. The former was
developed in the 1770s by Austrian physician Franz Mesmer who claimed to use the power
of gravity, and later of "animal magnetism," to cure various physical and mental ills. As
Mesmer and his treatment became increasingly fashionable in both Vienna and Paris, it also
began to come under the scrutiny of suspicious officials. Although discredited by an
investigation commissioned by King Louis which included American ambassador Benjamin
Franklin, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (later the
popularizer of the guillotine), the "magnetic" tradition continued among Mesmer's students
and others, resurfacing in England in the nineteenth century in the work of physicians John
Elliotson (1791-1868), James Esdaile (1808-1859), and James Braid (1795-1860), who
renamed it "hypnotism." In France the practice regained a strong following after it was
investigated by the Nancy physician Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919) and adopted for the
treatment of hysteria by the director of Paris's Salpêtrière Hospital, Jean-Martin Charcot
(1825-1893).

Franz Joseph Gall

Phrenology began as "organology," a theory of brain structure developed by the

German physician, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828). Gall argued that the brain is divided into
a large number of functional "organs," each responsible for particular human mental abilities
and dispositions—hope, love, spirituality, greed, language, the abilities to detect the size,
form, and color of objects, and so forth. He argued that the larger each of these organs are,
the greater the power of the corresponding mental trait. Further, he argued that one could
detect the sizes of the organs in a given individual by feeling the surface of that person's
skull. Although Gall had been a serious (albeit misguided) researcher, his theory was taken
by his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), and developed into the profitable,
popular enterprise of phrenology, which soon spawned, especially in Britain, a thriving
industry of independent practitioners. In the hands of Scottish religious leader George Combe
(1788-1858) phrenology became strongly associated with political reform movements and
egalitarian principles. Phrenology soon spread to America as well, where itinerant practical
phrenologists assessed the mental well-being of willing customers.

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North American Social Psychology

Precursors to American psychology can be found in philosophy and physiology.

Philosophers such as John Locke (1632–1704) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796)
promoted empiricism, the idea that all knowledge comes from experience. The work of
Locke, Reid, and others emphasized the role of the human observer and the primacy of the
senses in defining how the mind comes to acquire knowledge. In American colleges and
universities in the early 1800s, these principles were taught as courses on mental and moral
philosophy. Most often these courses taught about the mind based on the faculties of intellect,
will, and the senses (Fuchs, 2000).
 American social psychology was a thriving and active field of study. The discipline
was still a relatively new one, but it had prospered during and after World War II,
contributing to and directing wartime work on a variety of topics including attitudes, morale,
rumor, propaganda, prejudice, leadership, and intergroup conflict (Capshew, 1999; Faye,
2007, 2011;Herman, 1995). Social psychology, which had maintained a rather marginal
existence since the early 1900s, therefore grew signifi-cantly in the immediate postwar
period: from 1948 to 1960, membership in the Social and Personality Psychology division of
the American Psychological Association grew by 297%, a number exceeded only by the
growth of the division of School Psychology (Tryon, 1963).

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European Social Psychology

European social psychology does not fit readily into the characterisations of
indigenization that can be applied in other parts of the world. This is partly because Europe
has provided the earliest origins of the academic study of psychology, and partly because of
the great historical and linguistic diversity of the continent. It is shown that both before and
after the upheavals caused by the Second World War, European social psychologists have
consistently tended to give greater emphasis to contextual determinants of behaviour than
have their North American counterparts. In recent decades this has led to the formulation of
distinctive theories that focus upon social identity, social representation, and minority
influence, each of which has been vigorously pursued in centres of excellence that are spread
across differing regions of Europe. The genesis and maintenance of these indigenous
attributes is attributed to the transnational cohesion that has been provided by the congresses
and publications of the European Association for Experimental Social Psychology and to
some extent by the strength of its indigenous doctoral training programmes. However,
indigenization is not an all-or-nothing state, nor is it necessarily a stable one. Specific aspects
of globalization, such as the pressure to allocate resources on the basis of citation counts and
the impact indices of journals, provide powerful continuing incentives to merge indigenous
and mainstream paradigms, and there is much current research conducted by European social
psychologists that does not differ noticeably in its focus from North American work. The
continuing cultural diversity of Europe is such that European theories cannot be thought of as
expressing attributes of a specific and distinctive culture. It is more likely that despite their
origins, they will prove to have value in a broad range of cultural contexts. (PsycInfo
Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

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Asian psychology
Asian psychology, sometimes known as Eastern psychology, is a subfield of ethnic
psychology that examines psychological ideas and connects them to Asian contexts. Asians
as a group tend to be more familial in orientation, so personality evaluation is more inclined
toward family therapy than toward the individual. This is one way in which Asian
psychology differs significantly from other psychologies. Asian psychology thrives in its
applications even if there is no formal hierarchy or organization. Many Asian psychologies
are developed on prehistoric theories of physical and mental health that take into account an
energy system within the human body. Consider yoga and traditional Chinese medicine.

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What are the indigenous concepts of Filipino Social reality? Enumerate and explain?

1. Foster national identity and consciousness

The principal emphasis of Sikolohiyang Pilipino is to foster national identity and
consciousness, social involvement, and psychology of language and culture. It is thus
concerned with proper applications to health, agriculture, art, mass media, religion,
and other spheres of people's daily life.

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2. Social involvement

3. Psychology of language and culture

The relationship between language and culture is a complex one. The two are intertwined.
A particular language usually points out to a specific group of people. When you interact with
another language, it means that you are also interacting with the culture that speaks the
language. You cannot understand one’s culture without accessing its language directly.
 When you learn a new language, it not only involves learning its alphabet, the word
arrangement and the rules of grammar, but also learning about the specific society’s customs
and behavior. When learning or teaching a language, it is important that the culture where the
language belongs be referenced, because language is very much ingrained in the culture.

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Indigenous Psychology in The Philippines

This study focuses on different themes such as, identity and national consciousness,
social awareness and involvement, national and ethnic cultures and languages, and bases and
application indigenous psychology. Filipino psychology was a movement but later became an
academic discipline so that psychologists would understand the Filipino mind.

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