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Introducing Social Psychology
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When I first started teaching social psychology, I had trouble figuring out how the various topics in this
expansive field fit together. I felt like I was presenting a laundry list of ideas, research studies, and
phenomena, rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge. Of course, what was difficult for
me was harder still for my students. How could they be expected to understand and remember all of the
many topics that we social psychologists study? And how could they tell what was most important?
Something was needed to structure and integrate their learning.
It took me some time, but eventually, I realized that the missing piece in my lectures was a consistent
focus on the basic principles of social psychology. Once I started thinking and talking about principles,
then it all fell into place. I knew that when I got to my lecture on altruism, most of my students already
knew what I was about to tell them. They understood that, although there were always some tweaks to
keep things interesting, altruism was going to be understood using the same ideas that conformity and
person perception had been in earlier lectures—in terms of the underlying fundamentals—they were truly
thinking like social psychologists