Book review: Social Psychology

This post is written by my brother, Dominik Wrzesniewski.

Social Psychology – is it for me?

Definite majority of us live among other people. Our life is inevitably tight with lives of other people. We live with partners, meet other people in the offices, on the street or just meet some nicknames on the web, but there’s usually also a human being behind it. That is why our presence here in this world is connected with meeting other people. We can build these relations in many ways, more or less effective. What can help us much in that is social psychology. Social psychology is the division of psychology concerned with individual’s behavior in social situations. It answers questions like: how and why people tend to behave in that or another way in various situations with other people. During my study of psychology I came across a valuable book I would like to strongly recommend to you. This book names Social Psychology by E. Aronson, T.D. Wilson and R.M. Akert.

The book is a fantastic journey through social psychology that begins with brief definition of useful psychology terms, just to help you in easy understanding of the subject. Later on starts the presentation of basic rules and phenomena of social psychology such as: cognitive process in social conditions, conformism, group processes, human’s attitudes, aggression behaviors, prejudice, interpersonal attractiveness and many others. I’m sure all most important areas are respectively covered in consecutive chapters.

I like the two things about this book. First of all, reading it, you will have a great opportunity to reflect your personal life experiences with scientific attitude. It often takes a form of small discoveries when you say to yourself: ‘Wow! I know it that it is like that but I didn’t think it works smoothly in that way and could do more for me!’ or ‘I didn’t know it comes from that!’ Once you have more knowledge and awareness about something, you can better use it. The second thing is the result of how the book is written. I like the smoothness and lightness of the style it is written. Although the book is an academy book its language is very easy, topics are well illustrated with many examples and a touch of sense of humor makes that reading is a real pleasure.

I am totally sure that anyone can learn a lot of inspiring, useful and applicable things form Social Psychology by E. Aronson, T.D. Wilson and R.M. Akert.