The social psychology of everyday life

Social psychology is strongly grounded in the experimental method for rigid theory testing. At the same time, our discipline strives to generalize to and fully understand the social–psychological phenomena that manifest in people’s everyday environments (“the field”). Whereas the former requires optimizing internal validity, the latter requires high external validity, particularly ecological validity (representativeness of situations). To make the most of our discipline, we need not only strong experimentation, but also powerful approaches to capture and scrutinize our quintessential element, the psychological situation in the field. Here, we present one such field research approach, called SIP, designed to complement the strengths of experimental social psychology. It consists of three core features: the intensive sampling of Situations in people’s everyday ecologies, an Integrative approach to unite multiple relevant key constructs and levels of analysis (e.g., person and situation) under one working framework, and a Phenomenon-driven, open orientation towards the topic at hand. We illustrate the opportunities (and challenges) provided by the SIP approach with several key insights derived from a program of research applying the approach to various areas such as self-control, morality, and trust. These opportunities include (a) the value of description, (b) the benefits of sampling situations in a continuous and multi-dimensional manner, (c) a better understanding of the temporal dynamics of social–psychological processes, (d) the potential to study various person–environment relations (such as situation selection effects), and (e) new ways of mapping the correspondence between experimental paradigms and everyday environments. These features of SIP can improve theory building in social psychology by creating a stronger symbiosis between the lab and the field.