What are the trends in social psychology?

Social psychology is a branch of psychology dealing with
the relationship between people. Originally, social psychologists studied mostly
relationships between groups. In the mid 1700's and early 1800's, the idea of
romanticism heavily influenced European academic life. Romanticism expressed a longing
for a primitive past, before industrialism and colonialism. One effect of this nostalgia
was to elevate the indigenous cultures of places like Africa and the Americas. In the
European imagination, these cultures came to represent a past golden age to which Europe
could never return. 

When social psychologists studied
different cultures they often used ideas and images from Romanticism to understand
non-European cultures. However, post-colonial academic life in former colonies soon
challenged that notion. Scholars such as Franz Fanon of Algeria and writers like Chinua
Achebe of Nigeria, presented complex, multifaceted images of former colonies, images
that debunked the simplistic Romantic notions of these cultures. This trend toward
paying greater attention to the complexity of human cultures
continues.

Social psychologists have turned their attention
to a number of questions that in the past would have been beyond their scope of inquiry.
The questions they pose may be scientific, sociological, or philosophical in nature.
They study the social nature of emotions, social influences on personality development,
and socially constructed notions of ethics and values. These questions assume that
emotions, personality development and ethics are not the same for everyone, but rather
vary from person to person depending on social and cultural context.