Social Pych

Social psychology is the study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychology is the only method that uses the scientific method. People form hypothesizes and perform experiments to test the hypothesis. They would study how people are influenced by their social environment and they were experimental based. They would focus on the process that makes people susceptible to social influence. Scientists study group behavior, leadership, nonverbal behavior, conformity, aggression and prejudice. It is based on studying situational variables that affect social behavior. Francis Bacon in the early 1600’s was the founder of the empirical method. It did not begin to really develop until around the 1940’s the WWII period. Social psychology relies on anecdotal observations and subjective interpretation, using the scientific method and empirical study of the social phenomena. A famous person who utilized social psychological methods was Aristotle. He was famous for his firm based observations of society. Social perceptions and social interactions is the key to understanding social behavior.

Folk wisdom is a non-scientific observation that is handed down from generation to generation. It is folklore that involves stories, songs, rhymes, riddles, music, dance, oral history and proverbs. Through this informal method of communicating social observations is a way that people can, over the years, express social behavior, outcomes or expectations. An example of such a folk wisdom would be the tortoise and the hare. The outcome of the entertaining story is that haste makes waste and if you just keep plugging along you will win in the end.

Philosophy is the study of fundamentals of reason, existence, values, knowledge, mind and language. Philosophy investigates the nature causes, principles of reality, knowledge, and values using logical reasoning. There are five branches of philosophy. They are metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics. Metaphysics is the study of existence. Metaphysics is the foundation of philosophy without it the world wouldn’t know the interpretation of the world around us and how to deal with reality. Every action has a cause and an effect. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. This studies how people think. Epistemology helps to determine the truth from false. Ethics is the study of action. It studies right from wrong. It’s the method of how people categorize values and how to pursue them. It helps decide the course of action, work toward goals and lead to success. Politics is the study of force. Politics shows how a society must be set up and how the people must behave within the society. A society can’t survive if it’s ineffective. Esthetics is the study of art. It studies the purpose of art and how it should be evaluated. Philosophy is considered to be an academic principle that is taught at universities, but is not recognized in curriculums of medicine, law or theology. A famous person who was a philosopher was Plato. His observations and quotes describe social behaviors. A view in philosophy is what separates us from animals is due to our intellectual means and moral self-discipline.

Social psychology, folk wisdom and philosophy have many over lapping principles of society and the variables that result in some type of a human response. However, social psychology is the only discipline of the three that applies scientific methods in the assessment of these observations.