Some of the “big ideas” of social psychology proposed by David Myers (2008) are that people think differently from one another, institutions can be dangerous, groups influence individuals, and both biological and environmental factors influence behavior. An outsider who considers the profundities of social psychology might wonder why someone would spend time exploring such common-sense issues; that these ideas might seem new to the young field of social psychology, but seem like common sense to the layperson, while parallels to each exist in traditional ideologies.