Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 47

We stated above that one impetus for social psychological theory and research stems from life’s enduring questions. As important and fascinating as these questions are, they reveal more about the possibilities and complexities of human nature than they do about how humans actually behave. What we need is a general framework for understanding the actual causes of social behavior. Fortunately, social psychology has such a framework. From the vast array of research findings, we can derive a set of four guiding principles about the causes of human social behavior that together reflect the collective wisdom of generations of social psychologists. The principles are useful because they serve as general guides to our thinking and as starting points for our empirical investigations into the causes of social behavior. Together these four principles form the core lessons gleaned from over 100 years of research in social psychology.

Table 1.3

The four fundamental principles of social psychology are that social behavior is (1) purposive; (2) stems from both dispositional and situational influences; (3) is affected by how people construe the social world; and (4) is cultural (see Table 1.3) (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2006). Each of these is described more fully below and is further developed over the course of this text. We will demonstrate their validity again and again as we venture through the exciting terrain of social psychology.