3 Sense-making in social psychology

So far in this this course, you have started to become familiar with the concept of sense-making. In this section, you will start to think about why this concept is important to social psychology itself.

Social psychology sets out to understand how people make sense of the world – this is why, in this course, you will understand social psychology as second-order sense-making. But, of course, the people who practise social psychology are themselves sense-makers. This insight suggests that social psychologists and the scientific theories and methods they use to frame their research cannot ‘escape’ from sense-making. For this reason, a crucial task for anyone practising social psychology today is to ensure that the tools and approaches they use provide adequate frames for understanding what they are studying.

In this section, you will experience Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s 1944 study, ‘An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior’, and will examine how this classic social-psychological experiment has been made sense of by psychologists.