Showing papers on "Social psychology (sociology) published in 2008"

Social cognitive theory

Abstract: Theories of human behavior differ in their conceptions of human nature and what they regard as the basic determinants and mechanisms governing self-development, adaptation, and change. Social cognitive theory is rooted in an agentic perspective ( Bandura 1986, 2006a). To be an agent is to influence one's own functioning and events that affect one's life. In this view people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Keywords: Information Processing and Cognitions; Psychology

Faking it: Social desirability response bias in self-report research

Abstract: Objective: The tendency for people to present a favourable image of themselves on questionnaires is called socially desirable responding (SDR). SDR confounds research results by creating false rela...

Social Identity Theory and Self‐categorization Theory: A Historical Review

Abstract: The social identity approach (comprising social identity theory and self-categorization theory) is a highly influential theory of group processes and intergroup relations, having redefined how we think about numerous group-mediated phenomena. Since its emergence in the early 1970s, the social identity approach has been elaborated, re-interpreted, and occasionally misinterpreted. The goal of this paper is to provide a critical, historical review of how thinking and research within the social identity approach has evolved. The core principles of the theories are reviewed and discussed, and their effect on the field assessed. Strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed, with an eye to future developments.

The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience

Abstract: Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling, achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.

Narrative and the Cultural Psychology of Identity

Abstract: This article presents a tripartite model of identity that integrates cognitive, social, and cultural levels of analysis in a multimethod framework. With a focus on content, structure, and process, identity is defined as ideology cognized through the individual engagement with discourse, made manifest in a personal narrative constructed and reconstructed across the life course, and scripted in and through social interaction and social practice. This approach to the study of identity challenges personality and social psychologists to consider a cultural psychology framework that focuses on the relationship between master narratives and personal narratives of identity, recognizes the value of a developmental perspective, and uses ethnographic and idiographic methods. Research in personality and social psychology that either explicitly or implicitly relies on the model is reviewed.

An Introduction to Multilevel Modeling for Social and Personality Psychology

Abstract: Multilevel modeling is a technique that has numerous potential applications for social and personality psychology. To help realize this potential, this article provides an introduction to multilevel modeling with an emphasis on some of its applications in social and personality psychology. This introduction includes a description of multilevel modeling, a rationale for this technique, and a discussion of applications of multilevel modeling in social and personality psychological research. Some of the subtleties of setting up multilevel analyses and interpreting results are presented, and software options are discussed.

The Political Solidarity Model of Social Change: Dynamics of Self-Categorization in Intergroup Power Relations

Abstract: Social and political change involves a challenge to the status quo in intergroup power relations. Traditionally, the social psychology of social change has focused on disadvantaged minority groups collectively challenging the decisions, actions, and policies of those in positions of established authority. In contrast, this article presents a political solidarity model of social change that explores the process by which members of the majority challenge the authority in solidarity with the minority. It is argued that political solidarity as a social change process involves a contest between the authority and the minority over the meaning of a shared (higher order) identity with the majority. When identity ceases to be shared with the authority and becomes shared with the minority, majority challenge to authority in solidarity with the minority becomes possible. The model's contributions to existing social psychological approaches to social change are also discussed.

The emotional and social intelligences of effective leadership: An emotional and social skill approach

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a framework for conceptualizing the role of emotional and social skills in effective leadership and management and provides preliminary suggestions for research and for the development of leader emotional and social skills.Design/methodology/approach – The paper generalizes a dyadic communications framework in order to describe the process of emotional and social exchanges between leaders and their followers.Findings – The paper shows how emotional skills and complementary social skills are essential for effective leadership through a literature review and discussion of ongoing research and a research agenda.Practical implications – Suggestions for the measurement and development of emotional and social skills for leaders and managers are offered.Originality/value – The work provides a framework for emotional and social skills in order to illustrate their role in leadership and their relationship to emotional and social intelligences. It outlines a resear...

Towards a psychology of collective memory.

Abstract: This article discusses the place of psychology within the now voluminous social scientific literature on collective memory Many social scientists locate collective memories in the social resources that shape them For scholars adopting this perspective, collective memories are viewed as transcending individuals; that is, as being "in the world" Others recognise that, in the final analysis, individuals must remember collective as well as individual memories These scholars treat collective memories as shared individual memories We attempt to bridge these two approaches by distinguishing between the design of social resources and memory practices, on one hand, and on the other, the effectiveness of each in forming and transforming the memories held by individuals and the psychological mechanisms that guide this effectiveness

Reinvigorating the Concept of Situation in Social Psychology

Abstract: The concept of situation has a long and venerable history in social psychology. The author argues that recent approaches to the concept of situation have confused certain important elements. Herein, the author proposes that attention to three of these elements will reinvigorate the concept of situation in social psychology: (a) that the analysis of situations should begin with their objective features; (b) that situations should be conceptualized as affordances; and (c) that the interpersonal core of situations, in particular the extent to which they are influenced by relationships, is the proper and most profitable focus for social psychology. These elements are consistent with recent developments in the study of situated social cognition and may help better define social psychology's position within the sciences.

How Reasons for Entry into the Profession Illuminate Teacher Identity Development

Abstract: That which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered stars into space.... Yet if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing --Kahlil Gibran, 1923 As teacher educators better understand the recurved, holistic, and often deeply embedded ways in which teachers learn, they can better support meaningful professional preparation that serves teachers' careers, the students they teach, and the profession of teaching as a whole. This article uses the ecologically minded teacher identity as a useful analytic for understanding beginning teacher development. I am guided by a view of teacher development as a continuum rather than discrete, linear parts. That is to say that teacher recruitment, preservice preparation, inservice professional development, and teacher retention may be chronologically sequenced but, epistemologically, they are intertwined and continually loop back and forth to influence each other in mutually constitutive ways. Teacher development is circular even as it is also forward-moving: a teacher is always collapsing the past, present, and future into a complex melange of professional beliefs, goals, memories, and predictions while enacting practice. This article, then, considers how teachers rely on embedded understandings of and for themselves as teachers, which derive from personal and prior experiences as well as professional and current ones. These embedded understandings shape how teachers interpret, evaluate, and continuously collaborate in the construction of their own early development. Drawing on data collected from six first-year teachers from the same California university teacher education program, the article examines how multiple components of a teacher's professional identity mediate one another as each becomes intertwined within (and organized around) the teacher's understandings of teaching, teacher practices, and career plans. To present this analysis, I focus on ways a teacher's reasons for entering the profession illuminate teacher identity and influence teacher development. What is Teacher Identity? I have adopted a view of teacher identity which combines related ideas from social psychology, philosophy, and sociolinguistics. (1) Drawing from Mead (1964/1932), Bakhtin (in Holquist, 1990), and Holland et al (1998), I locate teacher identity inside a "cultural studies of the person." This angle of inquiry departs from traditional psychological frames of identity, which treat individuals as autonomous, purposeful, and fixed. It also avoids the over-emphasis on macrostructural treatments of race, class, and gender which dominate many modernist sociological and anthropological framings. Instead, the lens I use derives from recent inroads made by sociohistorical perspectives such as social and critical theory (Bourdieu, 1991; Holquist, 1990; Lave & Holland, 2001), phenomenology (Heidegger, 1997/1927), and sociolinguistics (Gee, 1992, 2000; Linde, 1993). This sociocultural model of identity considers that people are both products of their social histories, and--through things like hope, desperation, imagining, and mindfulness--move themselves from one subjectivity to the next, from one facet of their identity to another, and can in some limited sense choose to act in certain ways considered by them to be coherent with their own self-understandings. Applied to teachers, this view highlights both the constraints/opportunities on a teacher deriving from personal histories and also the actual agency any teacher possesses. There are several entrances into the construct of teacher identity. Picture a room with many doors, or consider Diagram 1 that follows. Each of the boxes acts as an opening into the holistic, circular mix of how any teacher's past, present, and future are linked; how the personal and the professional are in many ways inextricable; how context and self interact; and how each teacher component mediates (and is mediated by) the others. …

College Sophomores in the Laboratory Redux: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Social Psychology's View of the Nature of Prejudice

Abstract: Twenty years have passed since Sears (1986) alerted social psychologists to the many possible dangers faced by relying on a database composed mostly of students, especially with respect to the generalizability of the theoretical conclusions we come to. With a focus this time on the prejudice literature, this article examines how much has changed in our approach to whom we study. Content analyses show that prejudice researchers who publish in social psychology's major journals continue to rely heavily on student samples. Next, data are presented showing that important differences may exist between student and nonstudent participants in terms of how prejudice-related variables are expressed and used. The article concludes by raising metatheoretical concerns about the continued use of student samples both in the conclusions we arrive at as a science and in the very topics we study in the prejudice literature, with various recommendations suggested for decreasing this trend in relying on such a narrow database.

Toward Social Learning Environments

Abstract: We are teaching a new generation of students, cradled in technologies, communication and abundance of information. The implications are that we need to focus the design of learning technologies to support social learning in context. Instead of designing technologies that ldquoteachrdquo the learner, the new social learning technologies will perform three main roles: 1) support the learner in finding the right content (right for the context, for the particular learner, for the specific purpose of the learner, right pedagogically); 2) support learners to connect with the right people (again right for the context, learner, purpose, educational goal etc.), and 3) motivate/incentivize people to learn. In the pursuit of such environments, new areas of sciences become relevant as a source of methods and techniques: social psychology, economic/game theory, multi-agent systems. The paper illustrates how social learning technologies can be designed using some existing and emerging technologies: ontologies vs. social tagging, exploratory search, collaborative vs. self-managed social recommendations, trust and reputation mechanisms, mechanism design and social visualization.

Constructivist-Grounded Theory

Abstract: Grounded theory is a systematic method consisting of several flexible strategies for constructing theory through analyzing qualitative data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) This method begins with inducti

Elucidating the bonds of workplace humor: A relational process model

Abstract: A number of studies have demonstrated that humor can impact both horizontal and vertical relationships in organizations, but little is known about the interpersonal processes underlying this link. By integrating theory and research from the fields of philosophy, social psychology, communications, and leadership, it is possible to illuminate a combination of processes which, considered collectively, explain humor's ability to create, maintain, impede, or destroy relationships at work. I first review the classical theories of humor, which explain what motivates individuals to express humor and what determines humor enjoyment. However, since these frameworks focus on humor at the individual-level of analysis, they cannot speak to the social processes involved in a humor exchange. Research in the fields of social psychology, communications, and leadership provides insight regarding the remaining social mechanisms. In sum, it appears that interpersonal humor operates through four related but distinct processes...

Measurement-Burst Designs for Social Health Research

Abstract: Questions about variability and change in human behavior lie at the heart of much research in the behavioral sciences. This commentary examines the use of the measurement-burst design (Nesselroade, 1991) as an approach to study within-person processes that transpire over very different temporal intervals. Consisting of repeated bursts of intensive (i.e., daily or momentary) assessments, the burst design can augment the type of information obtained from conventional daily diary and prospective longitudinal designs. We describe how the measurement-burst approach can improve detection of long-term intraindividual change, and how it can be used to study intraindividual variability and change in fine-grained temporal relationships between daily experiences (e.g., hassles) and psychological states (e.g., mood). Some of the difficulties of implementing and analyzing data from measurement-burst designs are discussed.

Visual Analysis. New Developments in the Interpretative Analysis of Video and Photography

Abstract: The use of visual research methods has become increasingly widespread throughout the social sciences. From their origins in disciplines like social anthropology and sociology, visual research methods are now firmly entrenched in major fields of inquiry, including sociology, health and nursing studies, educational research, criminology, human and cultural geography, media and cultural studies, discursive and social psychology, management and organisation studies, political science and policy analysis. The rapid development of information technology, facilitating the creation and editing of digitised data, and computer-based techniques for the storage and management of visual data, means that new methodological approaches are being developed and are envisaged for the near future. Some important and promising approaches are presented in this issue by a number of researchers from different angles of the interpretive social sciences.

Psychological Aspects of Cyberspace: Theory, Research, Applications

Abstract: Millions of people across the world use the Internet every day. Azy Barak and a team of prominent social scientists review scientific investigations into the social, behavioral and psychological aspects of cyberspace, collating state-of-the-art knowledge in each area. Essential reading for students studying cyberpsychology or Internet psychology.