Social Cognition

An Integrated Introduction

Martha Augoustinos, Iain Walker, Ngaire Donaghue

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781446297261
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

The Third Edition of this much celebrated textbook continues to focus on the four major and influential perspectives in contemporary social psychology - social cognition, social identity, social representations, and discursive psychology. A foundational chapter presenting an account of these perspectives is then followed by topic-based chapters from the point of view of each perspective in turn, discussing commonalities and divergences across each of them.

Key Features of the Third Edition:

-Now includes coverage of the social neuroscience paradigm and research on implicit social cognition

-Updated pedagogical features and visual material

-An extended conclusion covers the ways in which the different approaches of the field intersect as well as a general discussion of the direction in which the field is moving.

Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction is an integrative, holistic textbook that will enhance the reader?s understanding of social cognition and of each of the topical issues considered. It remains a key textbook for psychology students, particularly those on courses in social psychology and social cognition.

Introduction

1

Michael Leunig’s cartoon, The Understandascope, captures the essence of something profound and, in this case, paradoxical. We see a sole figure, peering through a telescope-like device at a mass of people interacting below. In the background there is a city of buildings, with a plane flying by. Although the cartoon pre-dates September 11, 2001, it is hard to avoid seeing the plane as though it is flying toward one of the skyscrapers. The people in the foreground are all interacting with one another, presumably arguing, telling jokes, chatting up, deciding whether to go to a lecture or what to have for dinner, and all the other things people do in everyday life. High on the hill, the sole figure peering through the Understandascope observes all this and, aided by the wonderful contraption, understands it all. If only it were so easy.

The aim of social psychology is to understand the social nature of being human. Social cognition is an area of social psychology, with the narrower aim of understanding how humans come to understand the social world and their position in it. In many ways, the social psychologist is the solitary figure in Leunig’s cartoon, trying and hoping to understand humanity with the aid of some theoretical and methodological contraptions. Unfortunately, that endeavour and hope are thwarted by the paradox within Leunig’s cartoon.

Figure 1.1 The Understandascope by Michael Leunig

The solitary figure is separated from the mass below, set apart as though unafflicted by being human and unaffiliated with anything human. In peering through the Understandascope, the figure fails to recognize that he (and the figure does seem to be drawn as ‘he’, and that only highlights the point we are making here) is inseparable from those below, and indeed that any understanding that comes through the Understandascope is not given to him as if divinely, but rather depends on his interpretation of the information provided. His understanding is the joint product of the Understandascope and himself. Furthermore, if the Understandascope genuinely does provide understanding of what it is to be human, it ought to provide that understanding regardless of which group of humans it is focused on, and even – perhaps especially – when it is focused backward on the viewer.

In all these ways, Leunig’s cartoon neatly captures the nature of social psychology as an intellectual discipline, and says something about social psychologists as well. The technology of social psychology, impressively built up over more than a century, is like the Understandascope – capable of providing insightful information, but not insight itself. Unfortunately, social psychology over the past century has focused its technology almost solely on just one group of humans, the ubiquitous psychology undergraduate student, as though such people can represent all of humanity. Even more unfortunately, social psychology has rarely put itself and its practitioners in front of the Understandascope. It has proceeded on the ‘God Trick’ assumption that we social psychologists can, by standing on a distant hill and observing from a distance, remove ourselves from the realm of what it is we are trying to understand. This is clearly absurd.

The solitary figure in Leunig’s cartoon seems dismayed. It is not clear, though, whether that dismay is because of what he sees through the Understandascope (a sea of mostly angry-looking people) or because of his understanding of what those mostly angry-looking people are angry about. Is it the anger itself, or the understanding that there is little or no alternative to the anger, that is dismaying? Once again, Leunig’s cartoon captures nicely a common characteristic of social psychology and social psychologists. The index of any standard social psychology textbook is replete with references to the nasty, brutish aspects of humans. There is, in stark contrast, little about the upbeat, the stuff that might put a smile on the face of the solitary figure. The same is true of this book. That is not to say that the upbeat is less important. Rather, it is more a reflection of the urgency of understanding humans’ propensity to be nasty to one another. But lurking quietly in the background of social psychology is an often tacit assumption that by understanding the nasty and the brutish, we can better go about producing social change for the better. We share this view, and wish that social psychology more explicitly wrestled with an agenda for social change rather than being content with trying to understand.

In this book, we set out to examine what we see are the primary ways in which social psychologists have gone about building a systematic understanding of how humans come to understand the social world. Although social psychologists are all largely concerned with understanding the same social phenomena, there are remarkable divergences in how they describe, and certainly in how they understand, those phenomena. These divergences mark the boundaries between four major perspectives we cover in the book – social cognition, social identity theory, social representations and discursive psychology. In the book, we attempt to demarcate those perspectives, and then consider how each perspective understands phenomena such as attitudes, identity and prejudice. Our position is that an adequate social psychological account of any phenomenon – from the perception of the ordinary and mundane routine of everyday life to the genocidal behaviours of members of one group against another – must incorporate and integrate perspectives that range from the cognitive and intra-individual to the societal and ideological. Throughout, we try to turn the Understandascope on the discipline itself, and ultimately try to sketch how to focus it a little more sharply through the development of a broader, more integrative understanding, for the benefit of the discipline and for those we study.

Defining Social Psychology

Social psychology is an odd discipline. Born in the social sciences baby-boom of the late 19th century, it traces its genealogy directly to parental disciplines in psychology and sociology, and more distantly to the ancient Greek philosophers. Embedded within the family tree are notable as well as disreputable ancestors: the Enlightenment movement was central in enabling contemporary Western conceptualizations of the self-contained, independent individual; two world wars provided fertile grounds for the development of a technological hardware able to be applied in peacetime for other purposes; without the rise of liberalism, a discipline such as social psychology would be inconceivable; and social psychology’s concern with groups and the crowd is largely attributable – along with much of the discipline of sociology – to the worries of middle-class sensibilities about the rise of the masses consequent upon rapid industrialization in the 19th century.

Perhaps stretching the birth metaphor too far, social psychology is something of a bastard discipline. Its parents – psychology and sociology – have never had much of a relationship with one another, and both often disavow their progeny, perhaps because of guilt about their flirtation with something they each rejected, and perhaps because of a lingering, wistful attachment to what might have been. As a bastard discipline, social psychology has had to find its own way in the world, to work hard to establish its own identity, to develop its own ways of understanding the world and its place in it, and to strive not to be tarnished with the same ill-repute that sometimes afflicts its parents. In finding its own way, it has made some wrong turns, travelled down some blind alleys, and flirted with some dangerous characters.

Definitely stretching the metaphor well beyond breaking point, we might continue by claiming that social psychology is still a developing, adolescent discipline, still hung up about some of its earlier, still unresolved, complexes, and still struggling with a confusing array of possibilities. Social psychology has still not established its own mature identity. Struggling with identity conflicts about theory and method that are the legacy of its bastard heritage, it still wrestles with multiple ‘possible selves’. Multiplicity is not necessarily a bad thing – indeed, we would argue that it is a virtue. But some of the possible selves claim they cannot exist beside others, that they are mutually incompatible. Perhaps they can be sorted, with some effort and imagination, into a coherent, integrated whole self; perhaps they just need to learn how to engage in parallel play in the same sandpit; perhaps they need a divorce or a restraining order.

Somewhat oxymoronically, social psychology has never fully grasped what social encompasses. Early influential social psychologists defined social psychology in such a way that the social was always separated from the individual. For example, Gordon Allport defined social psychology as:

The attempt to understand how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. (Allport, 1985, p. 3)

This definition establishes the individual and the social as separate, antinomical, and sometimes even antithetical. Such a definition allows, and even encourages, a focus on either the individual or the social, and sometimes a focus on how one affects the other. What such a definition disallows is a conceptualization in which the individual and the social are inextricably inseparable, in which the individual constitutes and is simultaneously constituted by the social.

Considering the individual and the social as fundamentally inseparable radically alters the understandings of human experience that are developed by social psychologists. This also constitutes, or rather ought to constitute, the unique, interstitial position of social psychology – unifying the individualism of psychology and the ‘institutionalism’ of sociology.

The Crisis in Social Psychology

As with all adolescents, social psychology experienced a ‘crisis’. Almost five decades ago, Kenneth Ring (1967) published a provocative article taking to task the social psychology of his time for being frivolous, and for being more concerned with demonstrating a cute, clever experimental manipulation of the latest theoretical toy than with making serious progress in the task of building a body of worthwhile knowledge. Ring’s article heralded the start of what came to be known as the ‘crisis’ in social psychology (Cartwright, 1979; Elms, 1975; Gergen, 1973; McGuire, 1973; Pepitone, 1976, 1981; Sampson, 1977, 1981; Tajfel, 1972; Taylor & Brown, 1979). The enthusiasm with which an earlier experimental social psychology was met became dampened by critics who described a general feeling of discontent with the discipline’s direction. While experimentation deliberately and purposively controls for the ‘contaminating variables’ of the real world, it was argued that the artificiality of this contrived environment did not and could not adequately simulate human social experience. Furthermore, experimentation led to its own class of problem, such as demand characteristics (Orne, 1969) and experimenter bias (Rosenthal, 1969). Other possible sources of bias were identified, such as the political ideological, cultural and biographical backgrounds of researchers (Innes & Fraser, 1971).

Expressions of discontent were not only directed at the fetishism of laboratory experimentation. On a more epistemological level, Gergen (1973) claimed that social psychology could never be a science because the subject matter with which it deals (human social behaviour) is largely culturally and historically specific, and is itself changed because we social psychologists study it. Unlike the physical sciences, general laws of human behaviour cannot be established definitively, because these fluctuate with changing cultural and historical circumstances. Social psychology is, therefore, predominantly a ‘historical inquiry’. For some, the location of the crisis was in the unchallenged epistemological assumption that the individual is ‘the centre of all things’, and thus should be the principal unit and focus of research and analysis. In particular, Hogan and Emler (1978), Pepitone (1976, 1981) and Sampson (1977, 1988) argued that most of social psychology’s theories (dissonance theory, game theory, equity theory, attitude theories, and theories of personality and socialization) are imbued with the thesis of self-contained individualism.

The individualization of social psychology is largely attributed to the joint forces of experimentation and positivism that came to dominate the discipline and cloak it in scientific respectability. These forces also led to the demise of interest in collective phenomena in which early psychologists such as Wundt and McDougall had been interested (Farr, 1989). Along with the sociologist Durkheim (1898), these early psychologists believed that cultural phenomena such as language, myths, religion and nationalism could not be reduced to the individual level of analysis. In particular, Wundt believed that such higher cognitive processes could not be adequately studied by the experimental tradition which he founded.

The conflict and tension between the individual (psychological) and collective (sociological) levels of analysis have had a long history and are documented in the famous debate between Tarde and Durkheim (Doise, 1986). Those who have provided a critical history of social psychology are in agreement that the dominance of the former tradition over the latter can partly be attributed to the behaviourist views of Floyd Allport, who was highly critical of collective concepts such as McDougall’s notion of ‘group mind’ (Cartwright, 1979; Farr, 1989; Graumann, 1986; Pepitone, 1981). Allport’s methodological individualism is obvious in his famous statement: ‘There is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of the individual. Social psychology . . . is a part of the psychology of the individual’ (1924, p. 4). Allport was insistent that collective phenomena such as crowd behaviour and public opinion were nothing more than the sum of the actions and attitudes of the individuals who comprise the collectivity. His methodological individualism was a powerful force which helped shape the subsequent nature of the most dominant theories and methods in North American social psychology.

Little has been written of the ‘crisis’ since the late 1970s. For some, it was a minor distraction and little more than a ‘dummy-spit’ in the normal course of business. Jones (1985), for example, calls it a ‘minor perturbation’ in the development of the science of social psychology. For others, it has brought to the fore the limitations of social psychology’s methods, its epistemology, and even its research questions (Gergen, 1985; Manicas & Secord, 1983). One of Ring’s criticisms was that debates and issues in social psychology are never really resolved. Rather, they just fade away from centre-stage because people lose interest in them, not because we now know more than before. Indeed, in many ways, the crisis itself faded from centre-stage not because the questions being raised about the enterprise of social psychology received any satisfactory answers, but simply because the discipline lost interest. We believe that the crisis was of epistemology, not just confidence, and that the epistemological problems of the 1960s and 1970s are just as problematic in the early part of the 21st century, particularly with respect to the most dominant perspective of the moment – social cognition.

Social Cognition

Social psychology has always prided itself on never succumbing to the behaviourist revolution which so debased and derailed the rest of psychology. During the heydays of behaviourism, social psychologists continued researching internal mental constructs such as attitudes, values and stereotypes. But in avoiding the excesses and pitfalls of behaviourism during the 1950s and 1960s, social psychology became increasingly drawn to the information processing metaphor of the person which came to dominate cognitive science. Just as with behaviourism, cognitivism is associated with its own excesses. Today, the dominant perspective in North American social psychology is known as social cognition. Some have argued that the ‘social’ is a misnomer and that the only things social about social cognition are the objects of its study – people, groups, events. It has an impressive armament of mini theories, concepts and experimental procedures borrowed from cognitive psychology, and more recently, the neurosciences. But despite all its hardware, for many it has been unable to satisfy the doubts and the questions that the crisis raised.

Currently, research and theory in social cognition are driven by an overwhelming individualistic orientation that forgets that the contents of cognition originate in social life, in human interaction and communication. Unfortunately, the models central to social cognition focus primarily on cognitive processes and increasingly on neural substrates of the brain, at the expense of content and context. As such, societal, collective, shared, interactive and symbolic features of human thought, experience and interaction are often ignored and forgotten. Contemporary social cognition research is individualistic because it searches within the cognitive and perceptual domain of the person to understand social phenomena such as attitudes, attributions and identity. Social cognition will never explain adequately the totality of human experience so long as it remains at the individual level of analysis alone. However, unlike some critics, we also argue that mainstream social cognition research is relevant and does have much to offer alternative social psychologies that have emerged and gained momentum more recently. Indeed, we will argue that a reconciliation and integration of individual and social accounts can lead to a fuller, more reflexive, and dynamic understanding of human experience.

What is this ‘social’ with which we suggest social cognition ought to be integrated? It comes largely from three other approaches, each of which had their origins in European social psychology. First is the approach provided by Social Identity Theory (SIT; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). SIT provides an analysis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of textboxes
• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Glossary
• References
• Index