The Changes in Social Psychology for The Foreseeable Future

The future of social psychology is changing moving forward as it has been since the origin in the 1800s. In the 1970s, there was a revolution based around cognition and needing more diverse methods and better data analysis techniques. In the 1980s, the focus shifted to evolutionary psychology and those infamous topics of love and relationships. The 1990s seemed to focus on the brain—evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience. The 2000s was about the influence of culture—the internet and non-conscious approaches. The topics in modern times seem to be broadening with positive psychology, religion, intergroup relations and prejudice, emotions, social cognition, terrorism and while the topics within the field of social psychology are broadening—the discipline itself is broadening as well. Social psychology includes social neuroscience, culture and how it evolves and affects those within society, spatial analysis, and multidisciplinary research dealing in law, health, business, and education. I believe the future of social psychology will be more open in the future due to the increase of cross-cultural research and the progression of technology and culture within our society (Martin & Kirschner, 2010).

Social and personality psychologists are progressively recognizing the prospective of “big data” (Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), 2015a). The turn towards big data will mean that research design will change and be focused more towards algorithms (SPSP, 2015a). Social psychologists have a lot to offer in regards to this change facing social media and how modern culture is becoming more dependent on the use of the internet for social exchanges (Haidt, 2011). Culture plays an important role which impacts most of the decisions we make; some of the decisions our culture influences are: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the house we live in, and the technology we choose to use (Matsumoto, D, 1999). Many people do not see culture, but it is already established in their lives and surroundings (Matsumoto, V, 1993). Multiculturalism plays a role in the future of social psychology as it allows groups of people to understand different cultures. With cross-cultural research, social psychologists are able to study various cultures (SPSP, 2015c).

Another important change that is in the foreseeable future for social psychology is predictive research design studies (SPSP, 2015c). Statistical models from past studies could be used to forecast unobserved outcomes that are gathered in the future and simulations could be inspected from regression models of a former sample which could then be applied to data collected from a new sample; if social psychologists embrace and use these prediction methods, it could be extremely revolutionary for the field (SPSP, 2015c).

I believe that using sociocultural perspective could improve social well-being immensely; the approach to understand why humans behave the way they do is at the center of having a society that respects one another with the elimination or reduction in violent acts. Sociocultural perspective seeks to understand human behavior and personality development by inspecting the rules of the social groups and subgroups in which the individual is a member since these rules are often unwritten standards that guides a person’s actions (Martin & Kirschner, 2010). Using this perspective can help to clarify how a similar behavior can be translated differently in various cultures. For example, I live in South Korea which is an extremely small country (in comparison to the United States) which has an enormous population. There is no such time as personal space here, but if you don’t give someone enough personal space in the U.S. bad things could happen. Another example is eating habits. In Japan, you are expected to make slurping sounds when the food tastes good and a person may take offense if you don’t do this. However, my mother would be extremely upset and make some sort of comment about a farm if I did this in her kitchen. There are numerous social differences that occur on similar behavior but can be explained differently due to the diverse cultures. Sociocultural perspective can help society understand one another better which could lead to a greater social well-being.