The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.
Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology
Anthropology, sociology, and some subdivisions of psychology are numbered among the social sciences. As the belief that God directly controlled and influenced human behavior weakened during the nineteenth century, philosophers tried to construct a science of society, or social science. Social scientists rejected the idea that human activities occur at random and affirmed instead that all human activities reveal observed regularities or patterns. Gradually, social scientists refined such concepts as social class and kinship to explain these patterns.
By the end of the nineteenth century, as knowledge became more technical and specialized, economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists each pursued different avenues of inquiry into social experience. Although social scientists in one field borrowed ideas from other fields, each field tended to develop its own specialized language, or jargon, and distinctive concepts. What began as an all-encompassing effort to identify a single science of society became an enterprise marked by diversity, specialization, and often fragmentation. Today, the usual list of social sciences includes anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. In addition, some view history as a social science.
In this section, we have grouped together entries drawn from three social sciences: anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Sociology concerns itself with the behavior of humans in groups: with social relationships, social classes, social movements, and organizations. An economist might study a corporation to gauge its impact on production, and a political scientist might assess how corporations try to influence political campaigns. In contrast, a sociologist would explore the social relationships that develop among workers within a corporation.
Anthropologists also study social behavior, but with a difference. Where sociologists focus on groups in advanced societies of the present, anthropologists have traditionally paid more attention to social relationships among so-called primitive, preliterate peoples. In recent years, this distinction has broken down to a degree, for anthropologists now also study social behavior in advanced societies. Yet anthropologists are more likely to compare advanced societies with primitive societies. In this sense, anthropology encompasses a broader historical and geographical span than does sociology.
Psychology is basically the study of mental life. Some subdivisions of psychology have far more in common with natural sciences such as biology and chemistry than with the social sciences. For example, physiological psychologists study the role of the brain, glands, and other organs in mental processes and often experiment on animals, especially rats, rather than humans. Many other subdivisions of psychology, however, resemble the social sciences. For example, social psychologists investigate the role of the family and the peer group in the mental development of the individual. Both sociologists and anthropologists also concern themselves with mental processes, for all social relationships among humans have psychological dimensions. The difference is that psychologists start out with mental processes, whereas sociologists and anthropologists usually begin with social relationships and then speculate about mental processes.
