Question: What Are the Major Perspectives in Social Psychology?
Answer:
Sociocultural Perspective
- Stresses the importance of social norms and culture.
- Proposes that children learn behavior through problem-solving interactions with other children and adults. Through these interactions, they learn the values and norms of their society.
Evolutionary Perspective
- Argues that social behaviors developed through genetics and inheritance.
- Emphasizes the role of biology and gene transmission across generations to explain current behavior.
Social Learning Perspective
- Stresses the importance of unique experiences in family, school, community, etc.
- According to this viewpoint, we learn behaviors through observing and mimicking the behavior of others.
Social-Cognitive Perspective
- Supports an information processing model of social behavior, where we notice, interpret, and judge the behavior of others.
- New experiences can either be assimilated (using already held beliefs to interpret the event), or accommodated (which involves changing existing beliefs in response to the event.)
- By understanding how information is processed, we can better understand how patterns of thoughts impact behavior.
