Before I could attend, however, I joined the Unification Church as a full-time member. It was 18 years before I returned to academia. In the interim my interest had shifted to Sociology. Psychologists versus Sociologists Like Psychology, Sociology is concerned with the study of people. However, there is an obvious difference.
Psychology takes the individual as the unit.
Psychologists are not as likely to be interested in groups of people except to understand the effect that other individuals have on a particular person. Sociology, on the other hand, looks at the social environment- from the small family to the local community, to the nation and the world. Many sociologists are not as concerned with what goes on inside the individual except as it relates to the entire social picture. In-between the psychologists and the sociologists are the social psychologists, who are interested in both what makes people tick, and the dynamics of the groups that all individuals are a part of. They accept the idea that the social environment influences the individual but many would not subscribe to an extreme form of social determinism.