The Handbook of Social Psychology

"In 1935, Carl Murchison—known primarily as an academic entrepreneur rather than a scientist or scholar—published A Handbook of Social Psychology. No one was impressed."

"As with all previous editions of The Handbook, our first act as editors was to tap the collective wisdom of our field."

"The covers of the first five editions of The Handbook of Social Psychology were brown, blue, red, red, and red—respectively. The cover of the sixth edition is far more interesting."

"It scarcely needs stating that one never writes the history of a field, only a history of a field. Even so, how does one write a history of a field that has been subject to historical analysis in this Handbook alone four times in the last 70 years?"

"All scientists are philosophers. That is, they hold fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and how best to develop “true” (i.e., justified) knowledge about it. The way a scientist goes about building justified knowledge reveals what they take reality to be."

"Reliable and accurate measurement of well-delineated constructs is essential for rigorous and replicable research in social psychology, regardless of the research question, research design, method of data collection, or data analytic strategy … "

"To be sure, a great deal can be learned from other methods, but if the goal is to test causal hypotheses—that some psychological variable X is influencing an outcome Y—the experiment is the method of choice ... "

"Social psychologists are radicals; deeply so, almost by habit. Because to understand how people think and behave in the world, they often turn to running and relying on evidence from experiments in the laboratory ..."

... Globally, billions of people use online platforms and digital devices to communicate, socialize, study, shop, and work … These digital footprints of thought and behavior are commonly captured and recorded, creating extensive datasets widely referred to as Big Data … an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the human mind and behavior ...

"... concerns about the robustness of evidence and transparency of reporting , some long-standing and others relatively new, have started to be heard by editors, professional societies, and other gatekeepers in social psychology. As a result, social psychology has seen widespread changes to methods and reporting standards in recent years ... "

"Social psychology is among the most challenging of scientific pursuits because the object of scientific inquiry changes due to the investigation, and has thoughts about it. The scientist is a human being trying to discover how behavior is shaped by the social context ..."

"Emotions are the fuel that motivates behavior, and without well-developed theories of emotion, our understanding of human psychology is incomplete... In the present chapter, we review contemporary perspectives and research in affective science ..."

"Attitudes reflect people’s likes and dislikes; their favorable and unfavorable opinions; their support, opposition, or even neutrality on a topic. In other words, attitudes capture the extent to which people view something positively or negatively, or as good or bad ..."

"Why do people pursue the goals they pursue the way they pursue them? Why does one person adopt the goal to earn a graduate degree while another drops out of college? Why do some people dedicate their lives to fighting a social cause while others don’t bother to vote in a democratic election?"

" In their everyday lives, people often encounter consequential motivational conflicts ... in which they must somehow trade off one—often highly enjoyable, tempting—option against a conflicting—often more long-term oriented or prosocial—option. This is the realm of self-control research ..."

"Human beings have the ability to recognize themselves as objects, to reflect on their own thoughts, to project themselves into the future, and to pursue goals. All these are possible because humans have achieved selfhood ..."

"... from Aristotle, Tolstoy, and Confucius to Nussbaum, Bentham, and Buddha—many thinkers have weighed in to define the good life ... What can scholars today claim to know about the causes (and consequences) of well-being, and the many dynamic, moderating, and interactive processes involved? "

"People make sense of each other by trying to read each other’s minds. What researchers call 'person perception,' a branch of social cognition, focuses on making sense of the whole person in context, but mostly tries to understand the content and workings of another human’s various inner states and dispositions ..."

"In daily life, most of what we do and think is influenced, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, by others ... Many of society’s most pressing problems are affected by behaviors that people can change, and that are shaped by social influence ..."

"Many of our most consequential outcomes derive from negotiations—from the price we pay for homes and cars, to the salaries we earn, to quotidian outcomes such as which household chores we perform, where we go on vacation, and what vegetables our children eat ..."

"Love may be a many-splendored thing, but it’s also a battlefield ... This chapter offers a social-psychological perspective on the paradise and the purgatory of romantic relationships ..."

"... Research on teamwork is prominent or growing ... driven in part by the rapid rise in the use of teams in practically every area of work, as teams serve as engines of new idea development, problem-solving, and product and service delivery for organizations in every sector of society ..."

"When people live in a community, develop a close relationship, play on a team, or work toward a collective goal, they inevitably form a hierarchy, in that some people come to have more power, status, and influence than others ..."

" ... Cooperation and conflict are at the heart of our social lives ... Feeling and thinking are not only 'for doing' in a general sense, they are largely for addressing cooperation and conflict ..."

"... Humans stand out because of the broad range, geographical distance, and wide scale at which cooperation is sustained, even across group boundaries ... This chapter provides an overview of intergroup relations from a social psychological perspective, highlighting the psychology of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ ..."

"...age is the only universal social category—that is, the category that comprises subgroups that literally every single living person eventually joins. Thus, in some sense, ageism is simultaneously the only universal prejudice and the most ignored. "

"Social class begins with inequalities in material resources, but its influences on psychology and behavior are vast ... This widening social class divide—and its corresponding assumptions of differential value or worth—is not only morally questionable; it has become a threat to the social fabric and institutions that sustain society ..."

"... Gender identity often provides a deeply meaningful way to construct, understand, and navigate experiences throughout one’s life. And yet because gender is often embedded in social systems, normative conceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman create a series of affordances and constraints to the options and opportunities people have ..."

" ... Racism is a system of classifying individuals into racial groups or categories that are afforded differential value and access to the goods (and harms) of society ... This chapter seeks to analyze the racial patterning of opportunity and, thus, health, wealth, and well-being in many nations, as well as these and similar dynamics of progress and backlash ..."

"... The world (is) becoming more diverse along sociodemographic dimensions ... These changes connect people from diverse backgrounds in meaningful and positive ways, but they also contribute to conflict and tension that did not occur when people were not exposed to different identities and beliefs ..."

"... Enduring disparities in economic opportunity, education, health and healthcare, criminal justice outcomes, and political influence result in markedly disparate quality of life linked to membership in particular social groups. Understanding the roles that prejudice and stereotypes play in these disparities is a matter of obvious urgency ... "

" ... At times, the effects of prejudice are so atrocious as to defy comprehension ... at other times, the effects are so commonplace as to go almost unnoticed ... The overarching goal of this chapter is to provide a descriptive review of extant social psychological literature on prejudice reduction ... "

" ... The lump in your throat when you see a scared and hungry child, your goosebumps when someone helps that child, and the flush in your face after someone betrays you are all signs of moral emotions ... What role does emotion really play in our moral lives, and what role should it ideally play?"

" ... To understand human moral judgment is daunting, but it is also vitally important. Because people disagree about morals, mapping the structure and function of morals can help us to understand, and perhaps avoid, those disagreements ... By understanding the hidden logic of our moral minds, we can better appreciate a foundational part of our humanity ..."

"All human societies have evolved moral rules and norms ... (that) prescribe how group members should regulate their behavior to account for the rights, welfare, and preferences of others ... research in social psychology ... has identified critical variables that help explain when and why moral and immoral behaviors occur, and how they are interpreted and responded to by others when they do ..."

"... In the years since the U.S. Supreme Court first acknowledged social science research, courts around the country have done so on a regular basis ... We trace the relationship between psychology and law across myriad domains, noting areas in which the relationship has been fruitful and productive, as well as those research areas in which the promise has not yet been realized ..."

"The afterlife. Immortal souls. Rebirth. Sacrifice. Sacred values. Small, medium, and big gods. Special intermediaries between humans and gods. Monumental architecture. Ceremonial burial ... If extraterrestrial social psychologists were to observe human societies and report back, these would be some of the remarkable features of human social and mental life on Earth that they would find interesting. "

"... Social neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain mediates the dynamic relations between cognition and behavior in social contexts ... such as synchrony, social connections, social network, social hierarchies, dominance and status, motivated cognition, group dynamics, social influence on decision-making, and cooperation ..."

"... Evolutionary biology is an essential foundation for good, clear evolutionary thinking, which includes the emergent subfield known as evolutionary psychology. In this chapter, we highlight some of the best cutting-edge theory and research in evolutionary psychology, especially that which is tied to basic principles, theories, and/or models in evolutionary biology ..."

"... This chapter asks the reader to go backward in time to understand how we become complex adults, the usual subjects in our social psychological investigations. What do children bring to the table and how do these initial tools interact with the rich environments and varied persons around them to ultimately create the socially savvy grown-ups they will one day become?"

"... Why is one person shy and another outgoing, one person irritable and another even-tempered, and one person reliable and another irresponsible? Personality psychologists have a lofty goal – to understand the origins, development, and consequences of human individuality from the cradle to the grave ..."

"... Education serves as a bridge to the past, preserving a group’s history and identity, while equipping each generation to improve upon the past and adapt to novel circumstances ... Without an effective system of education, each generation would have to reinvent their group’s wisdom, technology, practical know-how, and much more ..."

"... Political psychology attempts to understand the psychological underpinnings of political attitudes and behavior and the ways in which individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by politics ... citizen competence, core political orientations and belief systems, political cognition, emotion and politics, and polarization in the mass electorate ..."

"... The term, culture, appears in many contexts of discourse–from food, clothing, and general mores of peoples around the world to characteristics of a workplace, consumers, and politics. The popularity of the culture concept in common parlance today belies its checkered history in psychology ..."

"... Not many of us will try to marry a robot, but everyone interacts with machines. How does the human mind react to the rise of machines? This chapter will explore the psychology of the machines and technology transforming our modern world—especially robots and artificial intelligence. "

"... Just as cultures differ across regions, they also vary over time ... This chapter will explore two questions about cultural change, with a particular emphasis on how technology drives changes in cultures. First, what is the relationship between cultural change and individuals? Second, what causes cultural change?"

"Decision making has changed in the age of information. While it was once an individual pursuit or an endeavor shared by multiple people, it is increasingly becoming a collaboration between humans and algorithms ... "

"Human behavior lies at the root of many environmental problems, including climate change, that threaten the continued existence and well-being of our species on planet Earth ... Sustainability psychology is thus emerging as an important new subdiscipline of psychology and one with tremendous positive potential ..."

"... Social ecology includes all the social and physical environments that constitute people’s habitats ... Socio-ecological psychology is then defined as the study of how social ecology affects one’s feeling, thinking, and behavior, and how one’s feeling, thinking, and behavior give rise to certain social ecology ..."

"... Here we have an activity that not only has been going on throughout all known history of humans and across all known cultures, and currently takes up the majority of most people’s leisure time. Furthermore, stories are an important way that people learn about the world and pass on their culture and beliefs ... What could be more important for social psychology to understand?"

"... The pervasive and seemingly effortless nature of conversation conceals its complexity as a highly coordinated system that facilitates social interaction ... This chapter seeks to foster a deeper appreciation of the exquisite coordination that lies at the heart of the conversation system—of turns, minds, and goals ..."

"... In traditional cultures (most of the world’s population) food is the largest category of expenses. In most cultures, the amount of time devoted to food (obtaining, preparing and eating it) is the third highest (following sleep and work) ... The food world is central to human life and human biological and cultural evolution. As such, it should be an important part of social psychology ..."

"Ask people what they did today, and the answer usually includes work. Around the world, people spend about a third of their adult lives working ... By studying work, social psychologists can gain a deeper, broader understanding of individual minds, collective behavior, and societal progress ..."