Social Psychology Graduate Program

Understand the structure, the identity and the functioning of the Program in Social Psychology means resuming its origins. Its structure and lines of research result primarily from the recognition of the differences between Philosophy and Psychology. Psychology emerged at the University of São Paulo on the occasion of its foundation, as a Chair of Philosophy course, founded by the French Mission in 1934, which was occupied by Etienne Post, Jean Maugüé, Otto Klineberg, and Annita de Castilho and Marcondes Cabral. While the specific area of teaching and research, Social Psychology has become in turn in the 1940s, the Chair of Psychology of the Philosophy course, thanks to Annita Cabral, an ex-student of Kurt Lewin and Max Wertheimer. In 1945 the professor invited Otto Klineberg, another pioneer of Social Psychology in the United States to teach, to his side, Otto Klineberg, another pioneer of Social Psychology in the United States. The first assistant of Annita Cabral in this same field was Dante Moreira Leite, an important theorist of Social Psychology in Brazil, and student at the University of Kansas to Fritz Heider and Roger Baker.

The Graduate Program in Social Psychology was established in 1976 with a Master’s course. In 1989 it organized the level of doctorate, recommended in 1998 by CAPES. Various themes and subjects of the research lines of the current Graduate Program were sown in the discipline of Social Psychology taught by Annita Cabral. This discipline was the psychosocial processes basics from the theory of Gestalt, Wertheimer and Koffka, Lewin and Asch; The Psychology of Art was covered by the study of the work of Arnheim; theories of Piaget, Freud and Jung were discussed by herself and by his assistants. This core of reflection and research generated the embryo of what would come to be the area of concentration and the first lines of research, focusing on the chairs of Social Psychology, Language and Thought; Cognitive processes in Social Psychology; Psychology of Human Relations; Group processes; Professional Guidance and Social psychology of work and organizations. These lines are a result of the work of more individualized level of research of the first generation of professors of the Program and who have obtained remarkable prominence nationally and internationally (Ecléa Bosi, Geraldo José de Paiva, Maria Helena Steiner, Sylvia Leser de Mello, and Zélia Ramozzi Chiarottino), being created a new discipline entitled Environmental Psychology by Eda Tassara. The Social Psychology of USP is a traditional program, however, always seeking the update and the constant evolution, needed to sync with the contemporary demands.