216 Stephanie Amedeo Marquez
qualitative data on language depicting how social psychology was defined
and how it was presented was gathered (see Table 3, Appendix C).
Two apposite examples will serve to illustrate how definitions of social
psychology in each text represent either the individualistic focus of the
APA, or the sociological focus of the ASA. Definitions with the PSP focus
on social psychology generally defined social psychology following the
APA definition as highly individualistic. One such example is found in
Morris and Maisto (2015), who defined social psychology as “the scientific
study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of one
individual are influenced by the real, imagined, or inferred behavior or
characteristics of other people” (p. 484, emphasis in original). This
interpretation highlights that the social group influences or changes the
individual. The most illustrative example of using the ASA definition of
social is found in Baird (2010, p. 200). “Social Psychologists study how
the thoughts, emotions and behavior of individuals influence and are
influenced by interactions between people” (p. 200, emphasis in original).
Interaction as an emphasis would suggest to the student reading the text
that group influence involves reciprocal communications in which the
subject of the group pressure also has input to engage or to impact the
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of others within the group, as well as
being influenced himself.
Elements examined suggest that out of 16 of the 20 introductory texts
for which complete data were available, 9 of them portrayed social
psychology as PSP, 3 portrayals could be categorized as SSP (Baird, 2010;
Franzoi, 2018; Griggs, 2017), and 4 varied in the combination of the two
elements (Table 2, Appendix B).
Cicarelli and White (2015) begin their explication of social psychology
chapter by introducing the Asch conformity experiment. “What factors
influence people or groups to conform to the actions of others, and how
does the presence of others affect individual task performance?” (p. 428).
Cicarrelli and White (2015) mention the influence of culture on
conformity: “Subsequent research has found less conformity among
participants” (p. 429). Unfortunately, the authors attribute this to
replication studies within collectivist cultures outside the United States: “In