Customer Reviews

Social Psychology (9th Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a university psychology instructor who favors a text demonstrating good science, I appreciate the careful documentation of research contained in this book. I also appreciate the personal touch of the anecdotes at the beginning of each chapter as a way of making the subject matter relevant to students. The authors do a masterful job of presenting a complex field, such as social psychology, to the college student. Teaching psychology as a science is a real challenge today and this text offers instructors a powerful tool for that purpose.

I highly recommend "Social Psychology" to practically any adult who can read. We are social beings and understanding each other helps us to create better relations. A better world. This book is excellent to examine and understand not only others' behavior but also ours.

Here is an excerpt that caught my attention: "how we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world-suggests that we are far from perfect in our ability to think clearly about other persons and reach accurate decisions or judgments about them."

"Social Psychology" covers many branches of psychology but the chapters give you enough information to learn just the basics. I think that this is great for lay people or new students in Psychology. I found that the personal stories that both authors used, helped me to better understand the topic of the chapters; however the, I met this psychologist and have been friends with since, led me to believe that this reaction was due to a schema. Perhaps our society has created a schema in which others' names define who we are. I particularly don't sympathize much with this.

The colorful pictures and cartoons in the book, I enjoyed greatly. I tend to be very visual in many occasions. In fact, I feel that many of the pictures were more thought provoking than the text. I found them very helpful to understand the subject. I also sensed that the targeted audience was mainly young students since many of the studies were conducted or focused on young students. I just wished that the authors had not forgotten that there are older people (like this book reviewer) who go back to school or who want to learn about social psychology. Once again, I highly recommend this book to anyone. You'll learn to view the world under a new perspective.

Social Psychology by Robert S. Feldman is the prescribed textbook for my course. It's a good text with good, concise information. The anecdotes and experiments are very relevant and it is very easy to understand. But it took me a while to warm up to this text. I prefer using this along with another textbook like Baron's Social Psychology.

The book is close enough to what the course requires that it is still useful, I wish that amazon would have more Ashford University books available.

I read several chapters from this book before I took a social psychology course, and saw that it was indeed very helpful. The author uses a lot of examples, which makes the concepts understandable. Also, the narrative text of the book is very high in quality according to me. It's pure, understandable, friendly and in harmony. (Look at the Franzoi's 1st edition: You will understand what I mean by no-harmony). I strongly believe that to write such a good book should have taken much time for the author. In addition, the author most probably had had an empathetic approach to understand the needs of the student and write accordingly. I don't mean to harm or criticize in any way those that made negative comments on this book. Nevertheless, let me convey you my opinion. According to me, using "I", the author only intended to provide a warm atmosphere to the student sharing his experiences and understandings. But, this is a way to encourage the student think of his/her own experiences in real life, which causes the assimilation of the knowledge more effectively. It's not to advertise himself(author), as far as I perceived from the book. Another thing is that, in psychology, phenomena that seem not logical to a human eye may be significant in a statistical sense. Very small differences, after the elimination of the error margin, may still be significant and therefore, meaningful. In the book, there are graphs not starting from the 0 point, and thus the difference may appear larger when looking superficially. Nonetheless, when looking carefully, undoing the illusory magnification, still the difference is observed, and I believe that the author made focus on the significant part of the graph to draw the attention of the reader and to make him understand better and easier. According to me, this is a good feature of the book and intention of the author.

I make specific what book this is a review of, because if you look at the user reviews for Shelly Taylor & D. Sears' social psychology textbook, you will find the exact same 5 reviews as are below mine. Either Amazon or some user are up to something sneaky.

Despite the comments below, which may or may not reflect someone who has actually read or used the book, my comments are based on using this book when I took the course and ordering it for a course I am teaching this summer.

Regarding the infractions cited below, I have not found this text any worse than others. It covers a wide range of an exciting subfield of psychology, and it does so in a way accessible to an initiate to the field. Allyn and Bacon provide excellent support for the text, as well.

Finally, I wish to note that while I am currently working in the same Psychology department as Donn Byrne, the second author, we are not affiliated in any way.

It need more summary and definition of key term

Social Psychology, 8th edition was very thorough, almost too thorough. The graphs were misleading in that the author sets them up to make it look like the results are extremely significant, when infact they're not. Also, concepts are stated with too many research examples that conflict with each other. They lack parsimony, and it leads readers to be even more confused about the concept after they read it thoroughly. The book followed a redundant pattern chapter after chapter that lacked stimulation.

Watch out! The cited research and the graphs were misleading. Look carefully at the numbers on the graphs and find out whether the graphs start at zero. Some of the results may appear to have large effects, but once you graph the results with a zero at the begining the big differences shrink to almost nothing. This book was a study in unethical use of graphs and misleading results to accompany them.

Skynyrd had a great point. As an undergrad, I have never seen such unethical use of graphing in my life. I would not recommend this book. There was plenty of info, but ethics are ethics. This book violated those ethics and shame on the publisher for printing that.