Title: Social Psychology: Is It Just Common Sense? - Mibba
Headings: Social Psychology: Is It Just Common Sense?
Social Psychology: Is It Just Common Sense?
Content: Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people's behaviour is pretty much what you'd expect." [ Murphy, C. (As quoted by Meyers, D, 1994: pp.15.)] Indirectly, this can be seen in the study of epistemic authority of professors in Statistics and Psychology by Raviv et al (1993) where it was found that students rated their Statistics professor higher in his authority of his subject than the psychology professor. Since Mathematics is arguably the “purest” science, knowledge in this area seems more “intensive” than in Psychology. Similarly, the Psychology professor was rated higher on general knowledge, emphasising that Psychology - on the whole - was largely common sense. However, what is often ignored in the naïve criticism of social psychology is that social psychology has substantial evidence to affirm it’s theories compared to common sense who does not. However, as previously discussed, social psychology has similarities and differences with common sense. These will form the basis of the following essay, expanding on the explanation of human behaviour, subjective versus objective, “agendas”, positivism, hindsight bias, reductionism and “true theory”.