Social Psychology: Exploring the Dynamics of Human Experience

This topical textbook provides a thorough insight into the discipline of social psychology, presenting students with a rich and engaging account of the human social experience.

Fully revised, the second edition includes a greater emphasis on cutting-edge topics within social psychology, including AI, virtual reality, social media, and political polarization. The textbook uses an accessible and readable style to show how the field’s dizzying and highly fragmented array of topics, models, theories, and paradigms can best be understood through a coherent conceptual narrative that builds on learning from previous chapters. The text also examines recent developments, such as how computer simulations and big data supplement the traditional methods of experiment and correlation. It contains a range of features, including key term glossaries and compact “summing up and looking ahead” overviews for ease of reading.

Social Psychology: Exploring the Dynamics of Human Experience covers an enormous range of topics from self-concept to social change, making this comprehensive textbook essential reading for any student of social psychology.

Robin R. Vallacher, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University, USA, and Research Associate at the Center for Complex Systems, University of Warsaw, Poland. He has authored or edited 11 professional books and written over 150 book chapters and journal articles. In recent years, Dr. Vallacher and his colleagues have adapted principles and methods from complexity science and nonlinear dynamical systems to investigate a wide range of topics in personality and social psychology, including self-concept, self-regulation, mindfulness, social judgment, social influence, close relationships, stereotyping and prejudice, sport psychology, social change, intergroup conflict, and the ascendance of populist movements in the U.S. and Europe.

Peter M. Gollwitzer, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at New York University, USA, and affiliated with the Zeppelin University Friedrichhafen and the University of Konstanz, Germany. He has authored or edited ten professional books and published over 300 book chapters and journal articles. His research investigates a wide range of topics in social psychology and motivation science with a focus on self-concepts and aspired-to identities, self-regulation of goal pursuit, and the down-regulation of negative emotions such as envy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness.