It can be part of a major in recreation, law and justice, or business administration. It can teach you about some of the causes of your own behavior and the behavior of others. It provides information in many careers that touch on human behavior. If you have been thinking that only one of these reasons has brought you to this class, you might want to consider adopting some of the other reasons as well. We like to observe people's behavior in real settings.
Social psychologists try to describe, explain, predict, and control behavior.
Everyone tries to do those things, sometimes without much success. The scientific approach of social psychologists is more productive, even though our findings sometimes run contrary to common sense and folk wisdom. A look at the table of contents of your text will give you an idea of the many aspects of behavior studied by social psychologists. Mastery of the terminology and facts of each of these areas is an important goal of our class, evaluated by unit exams. The second section of the class deals with how people influence each other by exerting and responding to persuasion, compliance requests, conformity pressure, and being a member of a group.