Social Cognitive Psychology

Book excerpt: A pragmatic social cognitive psychology covers a lot of territory, mostly in personality and social psychology but also in clinical, counseling, and school psychologies. It spans a topic construed as an experimental study of mechanisms by its natural science wing and as a study of cultural interactions by its social science wing. To learn about it, one should visit laboratories, field study settings, and clinics, and one should read widely. If one adds the fourth dimen sion, time, one should visit the archives too. To survey such a diverse field, it is common to offer an edited book with a resulting loss in integration. This book is coauthored by a social personality psychologist with historical interests (DFB: Parts I, II, and IV) in collaboration with two social clinical psychologists (CRS and JEM: Parts III and V). We frequently cross-reference between chapters to aid integration without duplication. To achieve the kind of diversity our subject matter represents, we build each chapter anew to reflect the emphasis of its content area. Some chapters are more historical, some more theoretical, some more empirical, and some more applied. All the chapters reflect the following positions.