social psychology

The study of the behaviour of groups of individuals. Social psychologists might record anything from fine-grained details of the body posture and gaze direction of an individual, in an attempt to understand non-verbal communication, to large-scale characteristics of crowd behaviour. They are also concerned with concepts that necessarily involve more than one individual, such as leadership, friendship, and persuasion.

Social psychology is the study of how individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others. According to Gordon Allport's classic definition, social psychology is an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals is influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.

Social psychology is usually considered a subfield of either psychology or sociology. Sociologists and psychologists who study social psychology tend to emphasize different processes, use different methods, and have a somewhat different idea of what constitutes knowledge in the field, this leads to futher organizational separation between the subfields (publishing in different journals, belonging to different academic societies).

Psychologists who study social psychology, take an approach to human behavior that emphasizes factors within the person (e.g., cognition, attitudes, motives, and self-esteem).

In contrast, sociologists tend to emphasize processes outside of the person at a more distant macro-level, such as social structure and a more immediate micro-level, such as social interaction.

In the fundamental social psychology and sociology little connections between the subfields are to be found.