Social Psychology And Racism

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Social Science is the discipline that focuses on human behaviour and relationships in the world, which consists of various subfields including sociology, anthropology, history, political science and psychology (Henslin [no date]). These fields attempt to understand the social world from different perspectives by using different approaches to certain social occurrences or issues, with each disciple having its own aspect which it focuses on. Each of these disciplines are therefore unique because of their perspectives when exploring a certain subject, however they do have similarities and may overlap during their investigations. To demonstrate this I will focus on how sociology and psychology differ and complement each other with their different…show more content…
The branch or subfield of psychology which contributes the most to understanding racism from the psychologically perspective is social psychology (Augoustinos, 2013). According to Routledge (2010) the causes of racism given from the psychological perspective include the need for dominance, self esteem issues, positive distinctiveness and many more. Psychology states that people naturally are hierarchical beings and therefore the need for dominance may contribute to racism because it provides the hierarchical division (Routledge, 2010). It also states self-esteem and positive distinctiveness are viewed as a contributing factors to racism because people use racism to boost their self-esteem and positive distinctiveness is seen as a factor because people enjoy seeing the group they belong as important, leading to discrimination towards those who are not a part of the group (Routledge, 2010). Therefore it can be said that psychology views racism as being an issue that is rooted in the…show more content…
Therefore, sociology is considered a social science because of the use of scientific methods to research society (Barkan, 2005). Sociology’s main focus is the social world and how people interact with each other and what effects this may have on people (Doda, 2005). Sociology has different branches, these include micro-sociology and macro-sociology, which have different parts of society which they focus on (Doda, 2005). Society involves a range of social activity and in society we have many social issues that arise, therefore it is intriguing to understand how a society works and why we have certain social issues in our societies. Sociologists focuses on how people’s membership to a certain group affects their behaviour and how people behaviour when they have face-to-face interaction (Henslin [no date]). The perspective sociologists have is that the social background of individuals influence how they act (Barkan, 2005). Therefore, it can be said that sociology’s focus is on society while psychology’s focus is more on the individuals in society and this is where the two social sciences

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