{

Psychologist Gordon Allport defined social psychology as the "attempt to underst

nd and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influen
ced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others."
} -- Social-psych pdf
In other words, a social situation can create brutal conformity in
decent people; acts of brutality cannot just be explained as the work of sadisti
c individuals. Situations and individual dispositions must both be considered. - Milgrim
Neither society nor culture actually does anything, for both are abstractions. Only
people act, and by acting, they create and perpetuate their society and its cult
ure.
This structural perspective has many attractive features. Human social life is h
ighly repetitive, and we can transcend the details of individual behavior and it
s formation to see patterns and regularities. For example, the concept of social
class references the fact that societies are divisible into segments whose memb
ers have a similar position in the division of labor, comparable education and i
ncomes, and similar views of themselves and their places in the world. One socia
l class, for example, might consist of small business owners, another of service
workers, and another of corporate managers. In each case, the similarities are
likely to be greater among the members of these classes than between the members
of different classes. Class is a structural concept; its focus is on the patter
ned and repetitive conduct and social relationships that can be observed within
and between various groups in a society at any given point in history. Moreover,
although society ultimately depends on the conduct of individuals, their action
s and interactions typically have consequences that they do not foresee or recog
nize. The everyday actions of people as they work, eat and drink, play, make lov
e, socialize, vote, take walks, and attend meetings seem powerfully influenced b
y social class. Their actions maintain familiar patterns of behavior and they pa
ss these patterns on to succeeding generations, who, in enacting these patterns,
re-create the structures of social class.