Social/personality Psychology

A boy, barely a teenager, sprays his schoolyard with bullets. A black woman and white man become lifelong friends despite living in a town filled with racial conflict and strife. A group of top-level executives--the best and the brightest--blunder into an avoidable decision that bankrupts their company, all because they fail to share crucial information with one another.

Topics of Study

How do people come to be who they are? How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another? These are the broad questions that personality and social psychologists strive to answer. By exploring forces within the person (such as traits, attitudes, and goals) as well as forces within the situation (such as social norms and incentives), personality and social psychologists seek to unravel the mysteries of individual and social life in areas as wide-ranging as prejudice, romantic attraction, persuasion, friendship, helping, aggression, conformity, and group interaction. Although personality psychology has traditionally focused on aspects of the individual, and social psychology on aspects of the situation, the two perspectives are tightly interwoven in psychological explanations of human behaviour.

A Scientific Approach

At some level, we are all personality and social psychologists, observing our social worlds and trying to understand why people behave, think, and feel as they do. In the aftermath of schoolyard shootings we can hardly help but hypothesize answers to the many questions that come to mind. We do the same when we encounter less dramatic events in our everyday lives: Why is that person smiling at me? Will my professor be a hard grader? How might I persuade my neighbour to keep his cats off my car? But personality and social psychologists go beyond pondering such questions and their possible answers. If the lives of individuals and social groups are full of mystery, then personality and social psychologists are the detectives investigating these mysteries? Systematically observing and describing people's actions, measuring or manipulating aspects of social situations, these sleuths use the methods of science to reveal the answers to the kinds of puzzling questions we each encounter every day.

Basic and Applied Research

Scientists in all fields distinguish between basic and applied research. Basic research in personality and social psychology tends to focus on fundamental questions about people and their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Where does an individual's personality come from? What causes us to fall in love, hate our neighbour, or join with others to clean our neighbourhoods? How are the psychologies of being male and female similar, how are they different, and why? How does culture shape who we become and how we interact with one another? Questions such as these aim at the very heart of human nature.

Of course, the distinction between basic and applied research is often a fuzzy one. One can certainly perform basic research in applied domains, and the findings from each type of research enrich the other. Indeed, it would be fair to say that most personality and social psychologists have both basic and applied interests.

Career Options

Because personality and social psychologists combine an understanding of human behavior with training in sophisticated research methods, they have many opportunities for employment. Many psychologists teach and do research in universities and colleges, housed mostly in departments of psychology but also in departments of business, education, political science, justice studies, law, health sciences, and medicine. The research of such individuals may be based in the laboratory, in the field, in the clinic, or in historical archives. Many personality and social psychologists are employed in the private sector as consultants, researchers, marketing directors, managers, political strategists, technology designers, and so on. Personality and social psychologists also work in government and nonprofit organizations, designing and evaluating policy and programs in education, conflict resolution, environmental protection, and the like.

Becoming a Social/Personality Psychologist

Although some personality and social psychologists go to graduate school to earn a terminal masters degree (M.S. or M.A.), most seek a doctoral degree (Ph.D.). For some careers, a masters degree may be sufficient. Generally, however, the doctorate is preferred by employers and is usually necessary for employment as a professor at a university or college.

Most personality and social psychology programs provide financial assistance to their graduate students in the form of teaching or research assistantships, and many schools waive tuition and fees at the graduate level. This, too, varies from school to school.

For More Information

Students seeking admission into graduate school have several useful sources of information available to them. The American Psychological Association publishes annually a list of graduate programs in Graduate Study in Psychology and Associated Fields. In addition, Social Psychology Network maintains links to graduate programs with web pages. Each graduate program will mail program descriptions by request. By reading journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Personality and Social Psychology Review, students can expose themselves to cutting-edge research in personality and social psychology. Similar information can be discovered by searching relevant computerized databases . Finally, students can gain much useful information by consulting with the personality and social psychologists in the psychology departments at their home or nearby colleges and universities.

Bharat Singh science research organization (BSSRO) publishes original papers in all areas of personality and social psychology and emphasizes empirical reports, but may include specialized theoretical, methodological, and review papers.The journal is divided into three independently edited sections.

Attitudes and Social Cognition addresses those domains of social behaviour in which cognition plays a major role, including the interface of cognition with overt behavior, affect, and motivation. Among topics covered are the formation, change, and utilization of attitudes, attributions, and stereotypes, person memory, self-regulation, and the origins and consequences of moods and emotions insofar as these interact with cognition.Of interest also is the influence of cognition and its various interfaces on significant social phenomena such as persuasion, communication, prejudice, social development, and cultural trends.

Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes focuses on psychological and structural features of interaction in dyads and groups. Appropriate to this section are papers on the nature and dynamics of interactions and social relationships, including interpersonal attraction, communication, emotion, and relationship development, and on group and organizational processes such as social influence, group decision making and task performance, intergroup relations and aggression, prosocial behavior and other types of social behavior.

Personality Processes and Individual Differences publishes research on all aspects of personality psychology. It includes studies of individual differences and basic processes in behavior, emotions, coping, health, motivation, and other phenomena that reflect personality.

Articles in areas such as personality structure, personality development, and personality assessment are also appropriate to this section of the journal, as are studies of the interplay of culture and personality and manifestations of personality in everyday behavior.