Differentiating between social psychology and social wisdom

A key difference between social psychology and folk psychology is that folk psychology relies on wisdom, experience, and culture, while social psychology relies on research. Social psychologists use the scientific method to ask questions, do experiments, and find answers. Social psychologists have a toolkit of research methodologies to understand social phenomena, including:

• Descriptive methods, like observation, case studies, archives, and surveys;
• Correlation research that uses data from descriptive methods to reveal correlation among independent variables;
• Experimental methods that attempt to create laboratory simulations so they can observe behavior changes caused by manipulating some aspects of the situation while controlling others.

Each of these methods has inherent strengths and weaknesses, which social psychologists address by combining methods to balance the weakness of one method with the strengths of the other. For example, the experimental method helps researchers to identify cause and effect, but the results are artificial. The lack of definition and cohesion fuel controversy of and in social psychology, including but not limited to the following:

Documents the obvious

Critics assert that social psychology documents the obvious, its big ideas and discoveries tend to align with what already is known in religion, philosophy, and folk psychology. Social psychologists argue that social psychology provides a more accurate picture of reality by using the scientific process to reduce untruth. The scientific process can be long and slow.

Meanwhile, today's social psychology truths can become tomorrow's expensive policy failures. For example, imposing self-esteem doctrines through schools to engineer a society free of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and educational failure has created generations of "conceited fools" whose inflated self-esteem is being connected to escalating the social problems the self-esteem programs were supposed to cure.

Same conclusions as common knowledge

Critics argue that social psychology discoveries are no different from common knowledge. Social psychologists counter by saying that proving or disproving common knowledge is a starting point for social psychology research. In addition, the criticism says more about the critic than the field because the critics suffer from hindsight bias; they overestimate their ability to predict events after they already know the outcome.

Deceptive and unethical research practices

Widely published criticisms of research abuses from experiments like Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's obedience experiments contributed to the creation of a code of ethics to ensure that psychologists treat subjects ethically. Critically assessing research from practitioners like Zimbardo and Milgram helps to explain why social psychologists still debate the approaches and results of these experiments.

In short, critics assert that the researchers violated their subjects, invalidated the results by actively influencing the research process and outcomes, and failed to create the contexts they set out to test. A continuing controversy is that the code of conduct still allows social psychologists to deceive and even harm patients as long as they can demonstrate that the ends justify the means, and have an ethics review board supervising the deception. Critics continue to reject the sponsorship and application of deception in social psychology research, saying that subjects cannot give consent when they are being deceived, and it harms the subject, the profession, and society.