Sociopsychology of Interindividual Relations and Institutions: Levels of Analysis, Events, Research, and Theory

Abstract

Sociopsychology is a multidisciplinary field study of interindividual relations, namely, a molecular segment of institutional or social practices. This area of studies has had an important developments over the last 15 years. Several experimental studies have been published in English and Spanish. However, the primary theoretical work is published in Spanish, and for this reason there is a need to connect the theoretical analysis to non-Spanish speaking audiences. We provide a conceptual analysis of sociopsychology as a scientific enterprise considering five main types of scientific descriptions: (1) the subject matter as a distinctive event; (2) levels of description of the event; (3) the factors and types of events; (4) the basic operations, methods, instruments, and experimental designs, and (5) main premises about social behavior and social contingencies. Our aim is to critically examine the sociopsychological view of social systems. Contributions of sociopsychology to behavior analytic knowledge of social relations and culture are also considered.