Social Psychology (5th Edition) by Elliot Aronson

This is 5th edition of the book written in early 90th (first edition was in 1994). The book did not change much since. This is fuzzy, politically correct and watered down presentation of the subject. For example when you learn about cognitive dissonance you are not told that the original Festinger experiment was connected with the behavior of a flood doomsday cult after the target date of the flood passed.

This might be an OK book as a second of third book for self-education (you can save money buying any previous edition, but in no way this should be your first or only book on the subject), but this can be a horror show if this is your standard textbook at the university 101 Social physiology course and you need to pass an exam. Here the inability of the authors to distinguish between important and unimportant will hunt you down.

The authors are too fond of abusing "social-psychology-speak" and introduce too many pseudo-scientific terms without real necessity: it looks like they try artificially inflate both themselves and the subject by immersing trivial notions in obscure jargon. This infatuation with jargon, on the level completely unacceptable for the introductory course is one of the worst features of the book. It especially evident are summaries which are the Achilles spot of the book: badly written, badly thought-out, somewhat detached from the chapters content, horribly structured and weakly typeset.

The other problem with this book as an introductory (101 type) book is that it is just too big. Story-telling approach that authors use is not bad per se, but inability of authors to distinguish between really important and entertaining psycho-trivia distracts the reader. Their recently introduced multi-cultural approach adds to political correctness, but also adds to the volume.

If you are a student it is very difficult textbook to learn from. It provides an ample opportunity for a professor to create a test consisting of dozens of hair-splitting terminology abusing questions. You can never be sure that the detail you missed is really unimportant. You need to memorize all definitions and most of the experiments mentioned it the chapter (you might benefit from creating a Rolodeck of experiments mentioned in the book) and using the website tests to prepare. Please note that sample tests provided on website can be perfect for killing any further interest in social psychology in probably 80% of students :-)

I would like to reiterate it again that the main weakness of the book is the author inability to distinguish between really important material and trivial or supplementary material as well as almost complete absence of connections between chapters. Actually chapters can be read in a random order. There are many descriptions of both good and petty/questionable experiments without authors distinguishing between a few critical, ground-braking experiments and regular mass of pseudo-psychological junk experiments.

Absence of CD with summaries and self-tests in inexcusable for a book with such a price, but the website is not bad (if you can find it ;-)

Typesetting of the book is weak and reflects authors complete absence of attention to structuring the material in a way that helps learners. The good thing is that definitions are put on the margins; the bad thing is that is some chapters (for example Ch 5) there just too many definitions. Typesetting of summaries is just horrible: huge solid blocks of text with few bold typeface word/sentences.

Although I am not a professional in the field, my impression is that for self-study there are better books, both more interesting and better organized. From a few that I browsed John Sabini's textbook looks like a better deal: more interesting contents with higher dose of relevant to student's life staff. Douglas T. Kenrick textbook contains CD and looks better structured.

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Last modified: November 08, 2008