A Career in Social Psychology

Psychology covers an enormous amount of ground, and inside it sit many separate specialties you can pick from. The smart move is to choose the branch that genuinely interests you, since real interest makes it far easier to stay focused and move forward. Graduate programs in psychology have grown broad enough over the years to match most of what students are actually looking for now.

Social psychology is one of those branches. The name points at what it does: it looks at how a person is shaped by society and where they fit within it. The field reaches well past consumer habits and reactions to advertising. It also takes in group behavior and how people, alone or together, respond to the social questions pressing in on them. War, work, violence, the quality of a person's day-to-day life, all of it falls inside the scope.

Part of that work involves how people handle stress and what stress does to them psychologically. Sometimes a psychological disorder traces straight back to social pressure. Deviant or antisocial behavior, meanwhile, can be approached through any number of competing theories rather than one tidy explanation. So the reach of social psychology runs from advertising and buying patterns on one end to public opinion on social issues and antisocial conduct on the other.

If this field appeals to you, get the right schooling behind you first. Plenty of institutes and professional schools of psychology offer the training and support that lead to success here. The path itself is fairly standard. Begin with a bachelor's in psychology, move on to a master's in social psychology, and, if you want to go further, pursue a doctorate in the same area.