The topics of social psychology

Often the closer something is to everyday experience, the more difficult it can be to convince people of the need for its scientific study. The study of the extraordinary has always had a glamour not usually accorded to the study of the ordinary. What happens at the other end of a telescope or microscope, that is the stuff of science. What happens in front of our naked eyes, that is just common knowledge. This is not just a problem for the social and behavioural sciences, although it is now our turn to deal with it: the physical and biological sciences have suffered acutely from this difficulty in the past, and no doubt continue to do so. Yet, if we look at the history of these sciences, we can see that the most revolutionary advances were made when scientists sought directly to explain the obvious. Concepts such as gravity, evolution, infectious disease, were all attempts to account for experiences which were very familiar to scientists and non-scientists alike. These concepts are now themselves so familiar that it is difficult to imagine how the world could have been perceived in any other way, yet already science has moved further on, through questioning once again the basis of what has now become ‘obvious’.

Human social behaviour is about as familiar an object of study as one could possibly imagine. We perceive it and participate in it constantly.