Comparing & Contrasting Psychology and Anthropology to Sociology

During the nineteenth century, philosophers tried to construct a science of society, or social science. (Hirsch 2003) Among the social sciences are subdivisions like anthropology, psychology and sociology which fall into this category. Social scientists rejected the idea that human activities occur at random and affirmed instead that all human activities reveal observed regularities or patterns. Gradually, social scientists refined such concepts as social class and kinship to explain these patterns. (Hirsch 2003)

By the end of the nineteenth century as knowledge became more technical and specialized, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists each pursued different avenues of inquiry into social experience. Although each of these social scientists in one field borrowed ideas for other fields, each one tended to develop its own specialized language and distinctive concepts. (Hirsch 2003) What started as an all-encompassing effort to identify a single science of society be...