ABSTRACT
A great deal of research in social psychology is motivated by one of two broad goals: (1) to understand the mental processes involved in how people make sense of the social world; (2) to understand how self-processes are shaped by the social world. In other words, social psychologists are deeply interested in the interplay between intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. In the final analysis, most social psychologists agree that neither can be understood in isolation. Though many naively take for granted a sovereign self that is inaccessible to others and independent of their influence, the opening quotation from William James, as well as the theoretical and empirical history of social psychology, suggests that the development and maintenance of the self is shaped by one’s situational context. Alternatively, many believe that perceiving the social world is a relatively objective process akin to, albeit more complicated than, perceiving the nonsocial world. Endless evidence suggests that this, too, is a naive view, an issue addressed in the philosophy of Martin Buber. Perceiving the social world is a subjective process shaped by an individual’s current motivation, emotion, and cognition, as well as his or her more long-standing traits such as personalities, self-schemas, and chronically accessible constructs. An even more extreme position was taken by the philosopher Nietzsche, who suggested that social perception is nothing but the projection of our own idiosyncratic representations onto the world in his claim, “Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image” (Nietzsche, 1908/1969, p. 261).
