Psychology

Dear students,

For the assignment, as you have seen, I want you to read some original research articles. I have chosen articles that (1) represent a different theoretical and methodological tradition in social psychology from the one represented by the textbook; and (2) touches on some of the important topics we will be discussing in the final weeks of the module, namely prejudice, intergoup conflict and identity. These are issues that remain relevant to contemporary South African life (as even a cursory look at any newspaper, almost any day, will prove!) and that still preoccupy social psychologists.

The assignment is quite simple: I want you to carefully read these articles and then to write a reading report in which you comment on different dimensions of their approach.

The first thing I want you to come to terms with is the theoretical position adopted in these articles. This refers back to my lectures during the first 2 weeks of the module especially: I said that the textbook understands social psychology primarily in terms of a cognitive metatheory, which means that things like 'categorization', 'attribution' and 'attitudes' are mental phenomena; they are processes that are conceptualised as taking place 'inside' people's heads; meaning, in other words, is an individual achievement; and language is something relegated to another level of analysis.

As opposed to this 'discursive' social psychologists start from language: rather than a private, 'mental; process, thought and cognitive processes occur in language language, between people, and is therefore contextually and historically mediated. In other words, the categories made evident in actual talk does not lead these social psychologists to theorise an UNDERLYING mental operation; the operation within the conversational space, within naturally occuring talk, is what they are interested in. Language is not secondary, merely the royal road to 'cognition'; cognition is linguistically mediated and...