Reading Comprehension:

Social psychology is as old as homosapiens on this earth. Throughout the recorded history, social nature of man has intrigued scholars, artists, and social reformers. Their work has significant bearing on understanding how people relate with others and conduct their social life. Scriptures, artifacts, music, poetry, all have contributed to this endeavour. What has intrigued scholars is the evidence of both, universality and uniqueness of social behaviour in different cultures. People have lived together in all cultures as family, community and nation, though they may not have learned to live together in peace. Human nature has essentially remained the same ever since. It seems that many of the questions which ancient social psychology raised are the same which contemporary social psychology is striving to answer. However, rapid social, economic, and political changes sweeping across the oceans and continents have thrown up many new questions for social psychologists. Many new theories and methods are being developed to unravel general principles of social interaction. It is therefore, not surprising that the quests and concerns in discourses of Plato and Aristotle were similar to those of the ancient Indian thinkers, like Manu, Gautam, Yagyavalkya and Kautilya. They were all concerned with the sustenance of social institutions to uphold the social code of conduct, while preserving human freedom. It was always considered important that people get socialized to conform to social authority and internalize family values and traditions. At the same time all societies have experimented with various systems to strike a match between social norms and individual aspirations. Social conflicts, violence, exploitations throughout the ages had kept social thinkers busy to examine geneses and expound solutions. Social psychology has evolved as a discipline to grapple with the issues of understanding social interactional process. The endeavour is to find ways to maintain ideal social conditions in which people can live together in peace and harmony.

However, apart from this common quest to understand and transform human behaviour, there are differences in the world-views; the ways in which the social reality is analyzed, explained and rendered meaningful in western and non-western cultures, like India. The difference is not just in erms of the methods of inquiry but more basic in terms of ontological reality of human existence. The comparison is further complicated by the fact that whereas Indian sages concentrated on the 'ideal' state, the Western scholars focused on observed reality of the interaction between man and society. The purpose of juxtaposing world-views of these different societies here is to examine the progress of western social psychology and its implications for understanding social issues and problems we are facing in India. A critical appraisal would enable us to view the knowledge base of social psychology with particular reference to Indian work.