Major Theories in Social Psychology

A synopsis of major theories of social psychology is provided with reference to three major domains of social-psychological inquiry: attitudes and attitude change, motivation regulation, and group behavior. Despite the heterogeneity of research topics, there is considerable overlap in the basic theoretical principles across all three domains. Typical theories that constitute the common ground of social psychology rely on rules of good Gestalt consistency, on psychodynamic principles, but also on behaviorist learning models and on semantic-representation and information-transition models borrowed from cognitive science. Prototypical examples that illustrate the structure and the spirit of theories in social psychology are dissonance theory, construal-level, regulatory focus, and social identity theory. A more elaborate taxonomy of pertinent theories is provided in the first table in this article.