Unit 5: Getting Along in the Social World

In earlier units, you learned a great deal about yourself and other people—for example, how you think, remember, and reason; how you interpret the outside world; how you change throughout the lifespan. Although much of this information can help you in your interactions with other people, not much of it is directly about your interactions with other people. This unit, however, is organized around personality psychology and social psychology, two subfields that share the same goal: to help us understand how we think about, influence, and relate to other people. To a social psychologist and a personality psychologist, the fun starts when you put two people together.

Although the two subfields share the same goal, they approach it from two different angles. Personality psychologists tend to focus on factors that are internal to the person and stable, whereas social psychologists tend to focus on situational influences on behavior. For example, when trying to explain why a student might or might not cheat on an exam, a social psychologist might examine the role of peer pressure in dishonest behavior, while a personality psychologist might focus on the role of personality traits such as honesty and conscientiousness. Social psychologists and personality psychologists do not deny the influences from the other side, they just pay less attention to them. Thus, you will find it useful to think of the two subfields as complementary perspectives, both of which can make important contributions to our understanding of how we think about, influence, and understand one another.

Many observers note that a major lesson of social psychology is the power of the situation to cause behavior. They are not saying that personality factors play no role in human behavior and everything results from the situation. Rather, they are pointing out that no one seems surprised that personality factors account for our behavior. In fact, many people assume that personality is the only influence on behavior, to the point of ignoring the potential role of situational factors. As you will see in Module 21, this tendency itself is an important discovery of social psychology. There are six modules in this unit:

• Module 19, Personality: Who Are You?, describes people’s dispositions in thinking about, influencing, and relating to other people. It is a discussion of the approaches that personality psychologists have used to characterize different types of human beings over the years. You will learn about the trait approach, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach and the psychodynamic approach that grew from it, and the cognitive–social learning approach.
• Module 20, Emotions and Motivation: What Moves You?, covers two topics that are key components in thinking about, influencing, and relating with other people. Our emotional life and motivated behaviors are an integral part of helping us get along in the social world. You will learn about some general concepts in motivation and about the important relationships among emotion, bodily response, cognition, culture, and emotional expression.
• Module 21, Social Cognition and Influence: How Do People Interact?, covers topics from the first two-thirds of the social psychology definition: thinking about and influencing other people. You will easily be able to recognize and use in everyday life the information in this module about attribution, stereotypes and prejudice, attitudes, persuasion, obedience, and group effects.
• Module 22, Intimate Relationships, is a partial list of some important ways that we relate with other people with whom we are close. Again, you will be able to use much of the information in this module about the closest relationships that we have during our adult years; there are individual sections on love and sexual behavior, sexual orientation, and marriage and divorce.
• Module 23, People in Organizations, is an introduction to industrial/organizational psychology, a subfield of psychology that applies many of the concepts of social psychology to people’s behavior at work and in other organizations. You will learn about human resources–related topics, such as job selection and training, as well as about motivation, leadership and influence, and workplace diversity.
• Module 24, Social Psychology and Personality Psychology: Science and Society’s Problems, describes how the two subfields differ from some others in psychology—namely, in their stronger focus on finding real-world application for many psychological theories and research finding