About the Book

Principles of Social Psychology-1st International Edition was adapted by Rajiv Jhangiani and Hammond Tarry from Charles Stagnor’s textbook Principles of Social Psychology. For information about what was changed in this adaptation, refer to the Copyright statement at the bottom of the home page. The adaptation is a part of the B.C. Open Textbook project.

The B.C. Open Textbook Project began in 2012 with the goal of making post-secondary education in British Columbia more accessible by reducing student cost through the use of openly licensed textbooks. The BC Open Textbook Project is administered by BCcampus and funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education.

Open textbooks are open educational resources (OER); they are instructional resources created and shared in ways so that more people have access to them. This is a different model than traditionally copyrighted materials. OER are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (Hewlett Foundation). Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or as printed books that are available at cost.  For more information about this project, please contact open@bccampus.ca. If you are an instructor who is using this book for a course, please let us know.

Adapting Authors’ Notes:

Although the original edition of this textbook was favourably reviewed by BC faculty, the reviewers noted several areas and issues that needed to be addressed before it was ready for adoption. These included incorporating new research and theoretical developments, updating the chapter opening anecdotes and real world examples to make them more relevant for contemporary students, changing examples, references, and statistics to reflect a more international context, and merging the separate chapters on “Social Learning” and “Social Affect” to create a single “Social Cognition” chapter. Over the course of our adaptation we attempted to address all of these issues (with the exception of American spelling, which was retained in order to focus on more substantive issues), while making other changes and additions we thought necessary, such as writing overviews of some concepts, theories, and key studies not included in the original edition. Finally, we added a list of learning objectives at the start of each chapter and a glossary of key terms at the end of the textbook as a quick-reference for students.

We hope that our work enables more instructors to adopt this open textbook for their Social Psychology or related courses and we further invite you to build upon our work by modifying this textbook to suit your course and pedagogical goals.

Rajiv Jhangiani and Hammond Tarry

August 2014