Class 3: Three Faces of Social Psychology
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Prof. Jessica Collett, University of Notre Dame. "Introduction to Social Psychology" lecture notes - Three Faces of Social Psychology
Class Notes
Sociological Social Psychology is broken up into three distinct "faces": Social Structure and Personality, Group Processes, and Symbolic Interactionism (House, 1977).
- Social Structure and Personality focuses on the fact that all people occupy a position in the social system, and that position affects individuals through role expectations, social networks, and status.
- Group Processes is primarily interested in the discovery and analysis of general principles underlying groups across a variety of settings, and the interplay between the individual and group levels of analysis.
- Symbolic Interactionism's basic premise is that human nature and social order are products of communication among people.
- This course is primarily focused on symbolic interactionism.
Tenets of Symbolic Interactionism
(Blumer 1969:2)
- Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them
- The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows
- These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters.
Works Cited
Blumer, Herbert. 1964. Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
House, James. 1977. “The Three Faces of Social Psychology.” Sociometry 40:161-77.
Copyright 2012,
by the Contributing Authors.
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Cite/attribute Resource.
Collett, J. (2009, January 12). Class 3: Three Faces of Social Psychology. Retrieved May 23, 2012, from Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Web site: http://ocw.nd.edu/sociology/introduction-to-social-psychology/lectures/class-three-faces-of-social-psychology.
