ABSTRACT
Social psychology is the scientific study of social behavior, with an emphasis on understanding the individual in a social context. Accordingly, social psychologists study a diverse range of topics ranging from intrapersonal processes shaped by or in response to others, such as the self, attitudes, emotions, social identity, normative beliefs, social perception, social cognition, and interpersonal attraction; to interpersonal processes such as persuasion and social influence, verbal and nonverbal communication, interpersonal relationships, altruism, and aggression; to group processes such as social facilitation, cooperation and competition, equity, leadership, outgroup biases, group decision making, and organizational behavior. The dominant dependent measure in social psychology has been verbal reports, an approach that placed an emphasis on clever experimental design and inductive inference (Reis & Judd, 2000). With the advent of social cognition several decades ago, chronometric measures, often used in conjunction with experimental techniques such as priming, were added to the methodological armamentarium. Importantly, social cognition also brought with it a conceptual framework for asking questions about the representation of and information processing components underlying social psychological phenomena.
