Social Psychology Principle and Themes of Interpersonal Behavior /
William D. Crano and Lawrence A. Mess
- Homewood, Illinois : Dorsey Press, c1982
- xv, 559 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Section 1. Core Concepts and Integrative Themes -- Section 2. Belies and Their Consequences -- Section 3. Social Behavior.
When social psychology was in its infancy-which, in fact, was not many years ago-it seemed almost mandatory for introductory texts to begin with a demonstration of the field's intellectual ties with the great minds of the past. In books of this era, such unlikely bedfellows as Hammurabi, Spinoza, Ibn Khaldun, and Aristotle often found themselves occupying the same sentence. The attempt at association with the giants of intellectual history no doubt was motivated in part by the hope that linking social psychology with past luminaries would cause some of their light to reflect on a discipline whose legitimacy was far from established. Thankfully, this phase of self-consciousness was short-lived, and the number of ancient referents in our introductory textbooks diminished as the value of the field became self-evident. Later writers had a different problem: they had to provide a reasonable definition of what was by now a burgeoning enterprise. In these books, definitions of social psychology characteristically took one of two forms. In one type of text, the emphasis was placed on brevity-"social psychology is the scientific study of people's behaviors, their institutions, and the mutual interplay between them"—at the expense of completeness and utility. The one positive thing that could be said of efforts of this type was that they did not waste much time before getting to the heart of the matter. An alternative route was taken by those who aimed for completeness, often at the expense of readers' interest and patience. We shall not attempt to synopsize efforts of this type, as it is easy to predict one's own reaction to a 40-page definition of a field whose interest value was far from established in the mind of the reader. In any event, since the realm of social psychology is so broad, the definitional approach was almost certain to prove inadequate to the task at hand.