Title: Psychology: An introduction to the science of human behavior
Headings: Psychology
Psychology
What are the different kinds of psychology?
Branches of psychology
Perception
Learning
Cognitive psychology
Intelligence
Neuropsychology
Abnormal psychology
How will psychology develop in future?
A brief history of psychology
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Content: Social psychology tends to study how people behave in real-world situations—for example, how people react to advertisements, why they commit crimes, and how we can work more efficiently in offices and factories. Social psychology doesn't always involve experiments; it might be based on questionnaires or observations instead. Of course, we can study social psychology in a lab using rigorous experiments, just as we can carry out meticulous experiments in the real world; the division I've drawn between experimental and social psychology is arbitrary and artificial, but it reflects the way psychology is often taught in schools and colleges, and how it's written up in textbooks and scientific papers. The reason for that is largely historical: in the late 19th-century, when psychology was still a very new field, psychologists were keen to be taken seriously as scientists, so they tried to adopt scientific methods to cloak the things they studied in respectability. To this day, there's a certain stigma attached to social psychology and sociology (the study of how individuals and groups behave in society); whether fairly or not, some people see them as soft sciences lacking academic rigor. At Cambridge University in England, for example, the psychology department still calls itself the "Department of Experimental Psychology" and its curriculum includes relatively little social psychology.