Steven Breckler, James Olson, and Elizabeth Wiggins want to bring social psychology alive for students. They know that the only way to do this is for students to experience social psychology themselves. From the inception of the Social Psychology Alive project, the book, workbook, online labs, and video were developed in tandem, so each component would work seamlessly with the other components to help students recognize social psychological phenomena in the world around them. The book presents a mix of classic and contemporary research in an accessible writing style that emphasizes the relevance of the findings to students' own lives. In the workbook, students are given activities that apply the principles; in "Social Psychology Labs Online," students actually participate in social psychology experiments and thereby experience the research process of social psychologists; in the video, students see examples of social psychology in everyday life and listen to conversations with famous social psychologists.
Each element of the package makes the course more active and the concepts more alive for students, so they come to appreciate how social psychology advances our understanding of social behavior.