Social psychology can be a challenging concept to master at the beginning of a psychology training. This week, a student in my college class approached me and asked how he could explain to his friend the difference between psychology, sociology, and social psychology. As I began to explain the differences to him, I immediately remembered that I had been through a similar journey of confusion, clarity, more confusion, and finally conceptually understood the differences and similarities between the three previously mentioned fields. This process of combining with similar, yet different fields of study was similar to the thought processes I went through when I began my journey to understand the differences and similarities between behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was an emerging school of thought that grew out of behavior therapy, which followed a social learning theory (Bandura, 1986). Cognitive therapy, however, followed an information processing model (Goldfried, 2003). The behavioral therapy was based on classical conditioning and a simple stimulus-response model (Goldfried, 2003). After the addition of cognition to behavioral therapy, CBT, the premise for humans followed a stimulus-organism-response-consequence (SORC) model. Thus, the organism in the SORC model allowed humans to be more than just a product of response to a given stimulus. With the addition of cognition to behavioral therapy, theorists began to notice how individuals thought about stimuli which in turn influenced their behaviors. A person's self-schema, cognitive representations about their past experiences with others, situations, and themselves that facilitate their u...... half of paper ......on, and the need to understand how groups influence not only an individual, but also how an individual can influence a group. Works Cited Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Baumeister and Bushman (2011). Social psychology and human nature. Belmont, CA:Wadsworth, Cengage.Goldfried, M.R. (2003). Cognitive-behavioral therapy: reflections on the evolution of therapeutic orientation. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 27(1), 53-69.Locke, E. A., & Kristof, A. L. (1996). Volitional choices in the process of achieving goals. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp. 363–384). New York: Guilford Press. Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A theory of goal setting and task performance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.