Question

Give a detailed account of social psychology in the new millennium

Answer 1

As the Social Psychology tries to understand the individual’s thoughts and behaviors in social settings, the subject matter of Social Psychology goes on changing as the years passes by. Due to the tremendous changes happening, the present day human beings are well advanced in every sphere. The speedy growth found in every areas of human life, social psychology is found to incorporate the latest developments into its subject matter. This has led to the changing and formulating of new perspectives in the study of social psychology. Mainly, cognitive perspective, application perspective, multicultural perspectives and evolutionary perspectives have become the focus of research on social psychology.

Cognitive Perspective: Social psychology is the field that studies both social behavior and social thought. The definition reflects the fact that both social psychologist have always been interested in How individuals think about other person in social situations. Most social psychologist believes that how people act in various situations are strongly decided by their thoughts. Social psychologists have attended to apply basic knowledge about memory, reasoning and decision making to various aspects of social thought and behavior. For instance, within this context, researchers have sought to determine whether prejudice stems from basic cognitive processes, at least in the part from our tending to remember only information consistent with stereotypes of various groups, or tendencies to process information about one’s own social group differently to about other social groups; secondly there has been growing interest in the question of how one process social information.

Multicultural Perspective: the field of Social Psychology has adopted an increasingly multicultural perspective, an approach that pays careful attention to the rate of culture and human diversity as factors that influences social behavior and social thought.