Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) within Social Psychology

Social Psychology can be a challenging concept to master when at the beginning of a psychology education. This week as a student in my undergraduate class approached me and asked how he could explain the difference between psychology, sociology and social psychology to his friend. As I began explaining the differences to him, I quickly remembered going through a similar journey of confusion, clarity, more confusion and then finally conceptually understanding the differences and similarities between the three fields previously mentioned. This process of combining to similar, but different fields of study, was similar to the thought processes I went through as I began my journey of understating the differences and similarities between Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) was an emergent school of thought which formed out of the Behavior Therapy, which followed a social learning theory (Bandura, 1986). Whereas, Cognitive Therapy followed an information-processing model (Goldfried, 2003). Behavior Therapy was based upon classical conditioning and a simple stimulus-response model (Goldfried, 2003). After the addition of cognition to Behavior Therapy, CBT, the premise for humans followed a stimulus-organism-response-consequence (S-O-R-C) model. Hence, the organism in the S-O-R-C model allowed for humans to be more than just a product response to a given stimulus.

With the addition of the cognition to Behavior Therapy, theorists began to notice how individual thought about stimuli which in return affected their behaviors. A person’s self schema, the cognitive representations about their past experiences with others, situations and themselves which facilitate in their u...

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...on and necessity to understand how groups not only affect an individual, but also how an individual can affect a group.

Works Cited

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Baumeister and Bushman (2011). Social Psychology and Human Nature. Belmont, CA:

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Goldfried, M. R. (2003). Cognitive-behavioral therapy: Reflections on the evolution of a

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M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action: Linking cognition and

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