Social psychology (sociology)

About: Social psychology (sociology) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 18151 publications have been published within this topic receiving 907731 citations. The topic is also known as: Social psychology & sociological social psychology.

The Nature of Deference and Demeanor

Abstract: of modern society have learned to look for the symbolic meaning of any given social practice and for the contribution of the practice to the integrity and solidarity of the group that employs it. However, in directing their attention away from the individual to the group, these students seem to have neglected a theme that is presented in Durkheim's chapter on the soul (1954: 240-272). There he suggests that the individual's personality can be seen as one apportionment of the collective mana, and that (as he implies in later chapters) the rites performed to representations of the social collectivity will sometimes be performed to the individual himself. In this paper I want to explore some of the senses in which the person in our urban secular world is allotted a kind of sacredness that is displayed and confirmed by symbolic acts. An attempt will be made to build a conceptual scaffold by stretching and twisting some common anthropological terms. This will be used to support two concepts which I think are central to this area, deference and demeanor. Through these reformulations I will try to show that a version of Durkheim's social psychology can be effective in modern dress. Data for the paper are drawn chiefly from a brief observational study of mental patients in a modern research hospital.' I use these data on the assumption that a logical place to learn about personal proprieties is among persons who have been locked up for spectacularly failing to maintain them. Their infractions of propriety occur in the confines of a ward, but the rules broken are quite general ones, leading us outward from the ward to a general study of

The psychology of religion.

Abstract: This chapter discusses progress in the psychology of religion by highlighting its rapid growth during the past 25 years. Recent conceptual and empirical developments are described, with an emphasis on the cognitive and affective basis of religious experience within personality and social psychology. Religion and spirituality as domains of study, as well as being common and important process variables that touch a large portion of human experience, are highlighted. Movement away from the previously dominant measurement paradigm is noted, and particularly promising directions suggestive of an emerging interdisciplinary paradigm are described.

Legitimacy as a Social Process

Abstract: To gain an in-depth understanding of legitimacy as a general social process, we review contemporary approaches to legitimacy within two areas of sociology: social psychology and organizations. A comparison of these distinct approaches allows us to explain the process, both in implicit and explicit ways at different levels of analysis, through which a social object is construed as legitimate. This comparison also suggests four stages in the process by which new social objects, both individual (worthy/unworthy individuals) and collective (organizational forms), gain legitimation: innovation, local validation, diffusion, and general validation. We then show how legitimation of the status quo—that is, the acceptance of widespread consensual schemas/beliefs in the larger society—often fosters the stability of nonoptimal actions and practices that are created as a result of these new individual and collective social objects. Finally, we discuss how consensual beliefs such as status beliefs and cultural capital ...