ABSTRACT
In modern terms, social psychology has a marketing problem. Social psychology deals with human social behavior, and with the cognitions, motivation, and emotions related with this behavior. As human behavior is to a large extent social behavior, in the ideal world, social psychology should be the pivotal social science, and should be widely known for its importance and relevance. But it is far from that. I have noticed that people in the media, business, politics, and in many other disciplines usually do not know what social psychology is. That the nonexistent discipline of mass psychology seems better known than social psychology tells something about the way we promoted our field. The fact that social psychology is so poorly known is the more noteworthy because in reality social psychology is already the pivotal social science that has made many bridges to other disciplines. Even many social psychologists may not know that in such seemingly remote fields-including movement science, marketing, leisure science, preventive medicine, geography, and gerontology-social psychological theories, in particular the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), are often self-evidently used. To give just one example: When I was collaborating with economists, I discovered to my surprise that Caryl Rusbult’s (1987) investment model-which I mainly knew from the relationship literature-was one of the major theories in the area of relationship marketing to explain consumer loyalty (Willenborg, 2001). This model assumes that commitment to a relationship, and therefore also consumer loyalty, are determined by three factors: high satisfaction (e.g., when the relationship has high rewards and low costs), low quality of alternatives (e.g., the perception of few attractive alternative partners), and high investment size
(e.g., having invested time and energy in the relationship). In general, working in such divergent fields as organizational psychology and health psychology, I have been surprised over and over again by the applied value of basic, even simple, social psychological notions such as social exchange and social comparison (e.g., Buunk, Zurriaga, Gonzalez-Roma, & Subirats, 2003; Ybema, Kuijer, Buunk, DeJong, & Sanderman, 2001).
