Social Psychology Quotes

Social action, just like physical action, is steered by perception.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

You got to have the killer instinct. If you do not have it, forget about basketball and go into social psychology or something. If you sometimes wonder if you've got it, you ain't got it. No pussycats, please.

I found marketing to be highly descriptive and prescriptive, without much of a foundation in deep research. I brought in economics, organization theory, mathematics, and social psychology in my first edition of Marketing Management in 1967. Today Marketing Management is in its 15th edition and remains the world's leading textbook on marketing in MBA programs. Subsequently, I wrote two more textbooks, Principles of Marketing and Marketing: an Introduction.

I think the greatest work in social psychology from the 1950s and '60s is enormously important. I wish every high school kid could take a course in social psychology. I think we're making enormous strides in understanding the brain. These aren't yet giving us great insights, but I feel like we're on the verge of it. In five or ten years this basically searching the brain is really going to change things.

He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.

One of the embarrassing facts from social psychology is that most stereotypes are true, in the only sense that stereotypes are ever true: on average.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary individual psychology, there's evolutionary social psychology. In Darwin's terms, evolution couldn't exist without variation, and variation is important in behavioral genetics. And so on, and so on. There are so many instances in which evolution actually sharpens the precision, I think, with which one can find out the importance of differences. We're interested in differences as well as commonalities.

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.

Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous... Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.