Sociocultural perspective

Analyzing the mob mentality that drives lynching, economic fads, and religious fervor, Edward Ross (1919) argued in the early 1900s that groups drive individual social behavior. This became the central concept of the sociocultural perspective, which sees that the social environment has the most substantial impact on social behavior. The environment includes social structures and normative systems. Social structures are the group formations in which the individual exists, like family and work. Normative systems are the values and beliefs that groups develop to control members (Pepitone, 1981). Nationality, social class, membership, and other factors at the group level drive individual social thoughts and actions.

A central concept of the sociocultural perspective is “culture,” meaning the “beliefs, customs, habits, and language shared by people living in a particular time and place” (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2007, p. 6). Such shared ways of doing and thinking are features of the environment that humans develop through interaction; the emerging norms dictate appropriate social behavior. The sociocultural perspective focuses mainly on variances in different cultures' behaviors (Synthegrate, 2020).