On the social origins of human nature

Abstract

the founders of modern social psychology in the 1930s and 1940s took it for granted that there was something special about the social level of analysis—that social phenomena were not derivative or reducible to mechanisms at lower levels of organization / but over the years, the process of legitimizing social psychology as a sub-field of the discipline of psychology has led us to focus almost exclusively on the cognitive, motivational, and affective underpinnings of social behavior—treating these individual level processes as the "building blocks" of social processes / this emphasis has had the unintended consequence of "colonializing" social psychology, which has been viewed—from inside and out—as a branch of learning theory, cognitive psychology, or psychophysiology purpose of this essay is to try to reverse this colonial image of social psychology and to pursue a more imperialistic agenda—to gain recognition for the idea that the so-called building blocks of human perception, cognition, and motivation have been shaped by and derived from the requirements of social living (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)