What is Social Psychology?

People are constantly being influenced by others. Social Psychology is defined as the scientific study of the way in which peopl's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people. Social influence is often powerful, usually outweighting and frequently overwhelming individual differences in people's personalities as determinants of behaviours. As a result, we must try to avoid making the fundamental attribution error ( the tendency to explain our own and other's behaviour entirely in terms of personality traits, thus underestimating the power of social influence).
To appriciate the power of social influence, we must understand how people form construals ( the way in which people percieve, comprehend, and interpret the social world) of their social environment. We are not computer-like organisms who respond directly and mechanically to environmental stimuli; rather, we are complex human beings who percieve, think about, and sometimes distort information from our environment. By emphasizing the way in which people constru the social world, social psychology has more roots in the traditional Gestalt Psychology than in that of Behaviourism.