Talk:Social psychology (psychology)

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Hi, I am new to this. I am a Social psychologist (PhD) and would like to be involved. Can anyone tell me what areas you need help with and how I can get started writing and editing articles etc? thanksPsyxologos 04:12, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Social psychology (psychology) has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

1 Welcome
2 Experts
3 Material from Social psychology moved here
4 Making progress
5 References
6 Organization of the page
7 Major overhaul
8 Article "quality" status
9 About "Famous experiments" subsection
10 Discussion about the move
11 request for comments
12 Self-concept section
13 Change to Footnote Reference Format

[edit] Welcome

Welcome to the psychological social psychology subpage. This page was created in response to the discussion on the social psychology page. -Nick^talk 04:23, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Experts

I've placed a call for experts on this page. If you have any experience in psychological social psychology, please help out. Take a look at the original social psychology page and see what info should be moved (or copied) over here. -Nick^talk 23:42, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

I think an "Important terms and concepts" section would be nice. I think the original page's version goes into WAY too much detail (especially when there are pages available for some of those concepts), but a lot of the concepts listed are important to include.

One thing I noticed while looking for pages on SP-related topics was that there was a lot of redundancy and strange redirects. One other thing to do may be to try and find people to work on merging those pages.

Y'know, just a couple little thing. Dujang Prang 17:22, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Material from Social psychology moved here

Material from the Social psychology page has been moved here but is in a huge comment embedded in the text. Draw on it or delete obviously irrelevant parts of it as you see fit. -Do c t or W 07:13, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Making progress

I spent a couple of hours today restoring much of the original content that pertained to the psychological study of social psychology, e.g. classic experiments, key concepts, etc. I also reworked the definition, focusing on Allport's explanation and the demarcation of psychological and sociological approaches. The article still needs some work and refinement, but it's starting to look better...

Jcbutler 22:33, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Serious attention to all this by serious content generators is both welcome and long overdue.

Must ask, though: why are the heuristics, persuasion, and group dynamics sections in both PSP and SSP wikis? Lucidish _{{ Ben S. Nelson }} 02:14, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Those will probably come off the sociology page at some point, though there still will be some areas of overlap when all is said and done. I've been focusing on tidying up this page first. Also, I'm a little hesitant about doing too much with that page since I'm not a sociologist. Jcbutler 17:07, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

It seems to me that it's well past time that we put more meat back on the original SP article by underscoring what exactly those points of overlap really are. Otherwise, we're just going to be repeating ourselves. Anyway, good luck. Lucidish _{{ Ben S. Nelson }} 04:55, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References

Many of the references listed on this page pertain to removed sociology content, or are not cited for other reasons. I'd like to suggest that we keep this page consistent with APA style and only list references that are cited in the article. A suggested reading section might be useful, but a comprehensive bibliography for social psychology would be far beyond the scope of what we can do here. --- User:Jcbutler

Hi J.C. Butler. It appears that you, yourself, added the multitude of references (on Revision as of 22:24, 19 October 2006 Jcbutler) that you just unilaterally removed without discussion. I suggest a discussion before seemingly drastic measures like that next time. Not sure what to do now. Those references were helpful, albeit a bibliography of sorts. Now I see you've added them back, sans E. Jones and Hastorf. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 18:10, 24 October 2006 (UTC) (talk)

Yes, I transferred all of them over from the old page a few days ago, with the thought of sorting them out later (later being today). Unless I've overlooked something, only the references specifically mentioned in the text are now listed. I got rid of a lot of them, including some that were really not related to social psychology at all, e.g. William James. Many of them were very high quality sources, just not "references." I still need to find Lewin, and of course there are all kinds of other thinks that need to be fixed and edited. I do apologize if I stepped on your toes there. Jcbutler 19:10, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Dr. Butler. Thanks for your kind response. I clearly see your points. But, still, I had thought that E. Jones' work and Hastorf's works were, although not referenced in the article directly as per your requirement (APA), worthy of note. I will at some point try to integrate their work into the articles. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 14:49, 25 October 2006 (UTC) talk)

[edit] Organization of the page

Although the information on this entry is becoming increasingly more accurate and pertinent to "psychological" social psychology, there is quite a bit of redundancy and unnecessary complexity that could be presented more simply. For example, information on attitudes, cognitive dissonance, attribution, persuasion, etc. is presented at the beginning under "major theories" and then again in the second half of the entry under "concepts." Some of these issues are discussed yet a third time under the heading of "research interests." I was thinking we should clean this up a bit by merging "theories and concepts" together, followed by the research methods section. This organization would also be more consistent with the main psychology page on wikipedia. Jcbutler 19:26, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Major overhaul

Wow, that was a lot of work... As promised (or as threatened?) I went ahead with my plan of cleaning up this page to eliminate the excessive level of redundancy that had emerged after the activity of many authors editing independently of each other. I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed thus far, and I made an effort to preserve original terminology and wording when possible. I also cleared up some extravagant mistakes that I hadn't even noticed before, e.g. the confusion of foot-in-the-door with reciprocity compliance tactics. It's still a work in progress, and yes, I need to fix the references yet again.

When I started rewriting this entry, I took all the separate little pieces on attitudes, etc. and combined them to eliminate redundancy. Then I alphabetized the topic list and put it under a single heading, "concepts." Unfortunately, this turned out to be excessively long, so I divided it in two pieces, based on a common distinction in social psychology between intra and inter-personal processes. This is a somewhat fuzzy distinction, but it works from an organizational point of view, and is frequently seen in textbooks, not to mention JPSP. I think it turned out fairly manageable, though we may want to play around with the categories a bit further, e.g. distinguishing social cognition from attitudes and groups from interpersonal relations. Something to consider as the article continues to grow, which it will probably do, if history is any guide.

So what happened to the theory? It was with some reluctance that I took out the ELM, since it was such a big chunk of this entry. The problem is that it is virtually impossible to list social psychological theories in any way that is fair and meaningful without doing a dissertation. If we put in the ELM, then why not Sternberg's Triangular theory of love? It's just as important and influencial. Why not attachment theory, impact theory, etc. etc. Imstead of doing a theory section, I distilled what I thought were the most important mechanisms out of the major theories (e.g. dissonance, automaticity) and included them with all the terms and concepts. What I've done isn't perfect and no doubt there is plenty of tweaking needed, but I highly recommend treating theories under their own Wikipedia entries. A list of links at the end of the article would facilitate this.Jcbutler 07:36, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

We could create an article that would list the theories' brief descriptions and its link.--Janarius 15:43, 6 November 2006 (UTC) Here's the article: list of social psychology theories.

Thanks, Janarius. I added a link to the theories page in the intro. I also put in some additional text to make the entry read a little less like an outline, and divided the topic areas so they wouldn't be so long. In the next few days, I'd like to add a history section, as well as a section on applied social psychology. Jcbutler 16:16, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I added the history section and removed some of the excessive amount of boldface throughout the article. My long range plan is to convert the "areas of social psychology" to paragraphs rather than their current outline format. I'll wait a bit to make sure that there is a consensus on all the bulleted items though. Jcbutler 21:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I just want to say that what Jcbutler has done for this page is wonderful. I applaud both the effort he has put forth and the quality of his work. Fine job! -Do c t orW 20:15, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow. This page is immeasurably better than the bloated blob of a page that formerly attempted to encompass social psychology and sociology's version thereof. Hooray, Nick, Jcbutler, et al!!! --Anon.

I think jcbutler deserves much of the credit. His contributions to this page are the primary reason for its excellent quality. -Nick^talk 23:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I must admit that I had plenty of help from Lewin, Festinger, Milgram, Latane, etc. And I want to keep reworking it and improving it, with anyone who wants to help. Thanks for the compliment though! Jcbutler 05:23, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article "quality" status

I'm not too familiar with this process, and there are no criteria on the Assessment page, but this article is already better than a psychology article I read that was a "featured article" on Wikipedia. If anyone feels it falls short in some way, please mention desired improvements here. -Do c t orW 02:54, 8 January 2007 (UTC).

Hi! An user wrote a peer review which features comments and tips to increase the quality of this article. You can read it here.Frédérick Lacasse 21:36, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the constructive input. I just completed some initial, cosmetic changes in response, and I agree that the article needs to be more extensively referenced. Does it actually need footnotes though? I thought APA (or Harvard) style was considered equally good here. I'm not sure how to address the "weasel words" as psychology tends to use a lot of qualifiers because our predictions are never exact or singly caused. We can go over the wording regarding this, and the references will surely help. We may also have to break up the sections a bit more, e.g. attitudes and persuasion, self and self-justification, interpersonal phenomena. --Jcbutler 22:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

The peer review has been written by a semi-bot created by AndyZ, thus some advices might not be applicable for this article. Maybe more accurate comments will follow on the peer review page. If not, you can take a look on this page for FA guidelines and other interresting (and useful) links. Frédérick Lacasse 00:11, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] About "Famous experiments" subsection

According to me, this too "listy" subsection is maybe one of this article's (small) weaknesses. Maybe it should be all merged to the History subsection or each experiment to its related concept in the Areas of social psychology subection. What do you think about this idea? Frédérick Lacasse 00:52, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

That list is one of the remaining pieces of content from the page as it existed prior to the split between sociology and psychology. It is a bit listy, but some of those experiments are highly notable, and not easy to integrate with the other sections. I wouldn't necessarily be averse to a revision though. I've got another review in progress by User:Zaui so I'd like to wait for his response before making any major organizational changes.

Another issue, by the way, is the placement of cognitive dissonance in the "self" section. I did this because I think the theory fits there, and for the sake of economy of presentation, but not all social psychologists would agree. There are several competing theories to explain dissonance. The significance of the self-concept and/or self-affirmation is perhaps the most popular view, but not quite a consensus. This is something that should be detailed on the cognitive dissonance page.

As long as I'm posting here, I've been giving some renewed thought to the social psychology disambiguation page. I think the split was a good idea, but what do the rest of you think about making social psychology (psychology) the main social psychology page, with a disambiguation phrase refering people to social psychology (sociology)? Most social psychology is done by psychologists, so it would make sense to have this be the default page. --Jcbutler 15:04, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion about the move

I have made an official request to move Social psychology (psychology) to Social psychology. Please state your position and reasons here, but note that discussion is also taking place at Talk:Social psychology.

I support the move because social psychology is primarily a branch of psychology, along with personality psychology, developmental psychology, etc. Most of the people that work in this field are psychologists, and most of their work is published in psychology journals. I do not believe that sociological social psychology is any less valid, but they employ concepts (e.g. social structures) and methods that are not frequently used in psychological social psychology. As is the typical case on Wikipedia, I think that the psychological branch should be the main page, with a disambiguation statement at the top directing people to the sociological branch as an alternative. --Jcbutler 21:08, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

There is no consensus on the other page, so I withdraw my proposal. --Jcbutler 22:24, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] request for comments

On race and intelligence, please [1] Slrubenstein | Talk 16:29, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Self-concept section

Breaking apart self-schema as cognitive from self-esteem as evaluative is a disputed issue in the literature (see Self-Esteem: Issues and Answers, Ed. Kernis, M.H., 2006). Self-esteem is a cognition about the self - "I am a good person", and self-schema are emotion-laden - "I care a lot about some of my attributes".

Also disputed in the literature is the idea that self-esteem is a basic human motivation. Some self-esteem researchers don't even believe self-esteem is a valuable construct (see Baumeister et al., 2003 for a review). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.113.119.192 (talk) 20:54, 12 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Change to Footnote Reference Format

I think it's time we move the article over to Wikipedia's standard reference format rather than the semi-APA style that we have now. As such, any articles/sources listed in the current reference section should be cited somewhere in the article. -Nick^talk 21:30, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia has two recommended ways of doing references. Footnotes and Harvard referencing [2], which APA style is a variant of. It would probably be a lot easier to convert to standard Harvard referencing, but I don't see any burning need to go with one or the other. Certainly User:SandyGeorgia's criticism that the article is uncited is not warranted, so I am reverting back to the previous quality rating.

By the way, the new section on interpersonal perception is interesting, but I wonder if it is mainstream enough to warrant such coverage in this article. This terminology is not any of the social psychology textbooks I checked, and that is a good benchmark for what should go into this article. Maybe a brief mention and then give it an entry of its own? --Jcbutler 17:26, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

I didn't want to change the reference format because it seemed like unnecessary work, but I think Nick might be right about this. It looks like footnotes are becoming the preferred citation method, and they avoid the occasional problem of content being revised or removed and unused references left hanging around. So who wants to do the conversion? Any volunteers? Maybe if everyone did three references... --Jcbutler (talk) 22:28, 18 April 2008 (UTC)