Deconstructing Social Psychology

Ian Parker, John Shotter, Ian Parker, John Shotter

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317548515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Since the early 1970s, social psychology has been in crisis. At the time Reconstructing Social Psychology (Armistead) provided a critical review of theories and assumptions in the discipline. Originally published in 1990, this title not only updates that review but illustrates the ways in which assumptions had changed at the time. The crisis is no longer seen as one which can be resolved within social psychology itself, but rather as one more deeply rooted in modern society.

The contributors look at the issues raised by deconstruction in the other human sciences, as well as investigating the claims made by social psychology as a discipline. They examine the rhetoric and texts of social psychology, analysing how the texts which hold the discipline together obtain their power. The arguments include the political implications of deconstructive ideas, focusing on particular issues such as research, therapy and feminism.

Deconstructing Social Psychology presents a strong selection of new critical writing in social psychology. It will still be a useful text for students of psychology, social science, and sociology, and for those working in the area of language.

Part One

TEXTS AND RHETORIC

Social psychology is a collection of texts and practices. The five chapters in Part 1 focus on texts, and the ways in which these texts attempt to produce and guarantee ‘truth’ in the discipline. Peter Stringer opens the set with an overview of introductions to social psychology textbooks. The introduction to a textbook attempts to account for the spread of different, contradictory theories and ‘discoveries’ about social behaviour that the reader will find. It is a good place to start in a deconstruction of social psychology, for the introduction foregrounds some of the (dubious) assumptions that the writer is making about what a social psychologist should be doing. These assumptions can be unravelled further by distinguishing between different narratives that run through the enterprise holding its texts together. Corinne Squire draws attention to the detective story, autobiography, and science fiction story narratives which organise social psychology’s search for truth, enlightenment and progress. This scathing attack helps expose the falsities which masquerade as facts, as a narrative grips the writer and reader and draws them into the discipline.

There is a risk, of course, that critics of traditional social psychology might attack the texts as fictional accounts only to be caught in the trap of positing their own ‘true’ account Worse, they may start conceding that there are true descriptions in social psychology which have to be sorted out from the false ones. Here, of course, radicals can all too quickly be drawn by an undertow, straight back into the discipline. One of the characteristics of a deconstructive approach to texts is that the contradictions and oppositions that it sets up are simply strategic devices to help us escape from the dominant concepts. When we draw attention to the rhetorical nature of social psychology, for example, we are making a point about all texts, including our own. Michael Billig, then, emphasises that there are argumentative aspects to all accounts of social activity. A reflexive outcome of this position is to say that a radical social psychology would be deliberately rhetorical. Celia Kitzinger drives home the point by showing how the opposition between ‘pseudoscience’ (a merely rhetorical, and therefore false science) and ‘true science’ has the effect of reinstating some very nasty ‘truths’ and unpleasant scientific norms. The opposition between true and false science is rhetorical. It is a textual and – to anticipate themes taken up later in the book – a political matter.

Matters would be so much easier if we could judge the truth of a text by finding out what the position and intentions of the author were. Social psychologists do, in fact, often labour under the illusion that it is possible to untangle rhetoric and textual devices free from the individual who produced it. Deconstruction takes off, however, from the text itself, and Antony Easthope draws on Derrida to show why this is so. He offers an example of the deconstruction of a text in which theories of intention are especially important. We have arrived at the point where the theory of writing, of différance, that deconstruction works with becomes relevant. The turn to rhetoric, and the deconstruction of the opposition between slippery rhetoric and perfect communication, are crucial to an understanding of how social psychology operates.

Chapter One

PREFACING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY:

A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE

Peter Stringer

In this chapter I should like to be able to persuade you of two points: first, that in reflections on the discipline of social psychology, both generally and more particularly with respect to its teaching practices, textbooks deserve a different kind of attention than they have yet received; and, second, that by exposing textbooks, and eventually other social psychological texts, not to conventional psychological analyses, but to the kind of close reading which is suggested by recent literary theory, it is possible to reveal something of what is involved in the representation and transmission of social psychology as a body of knowledge and as a practice.

BACKGROUND

‘Textbook’ is intended here to refer to those fairly weighty volumes which are often used to introduce social psychology to students. Well-known examples are those by Kretch and Crutchfield, Brown, Secord and Backman, Hollander, Wrightsman, and so on. The observations which follow are based on an examination of nearly thirty distinct textbooks, all published between 1976 and 1981. The dates are a matter of convenience and autobiography. I collected the books in 1982–3; and produced the first draft of this chapter as a conference paper early in 1984. For the sake of homogeneity, they are all North American books, which aim to give a global overview of social psychology from a psychological (rather than sociological) perspective.

Readings which are influenced by recent literary theory should be contrasted with conventional psychological analyses of texts. The latter would, for example, investigate the effect of texts on readers – their readability, communication effectiveness, and so on; how readers process information in a text; or attempt explanations of the text in terms of the author’s intentions and values. The former approach, on the other hand, has the virtue of not only drawing on a rich, broad-ranging and continually developing intellectual resource, but most importantly of avoiding the use of the same analytic resources as the subject of study. It works from post-structuralist or deconstructionist literary theory, or more broadly from certain areas of discourse analysis. I say ‘from’, and not ‘within’. It is a matter of being influenced by, rather than strictly applying, a set of ideas. Elsewhere in this volume (Chapter 12), Michael says: ‘Deconstruction’s task is to recover the excluded term by which the present(ed) term is formulated’. I shall use the justifications which are adopted in textbook prefaces to indicate what is in fact excluded by the textbooks, despite their prefaced claims. Varieties of the approach have been adopted at length elsewhere with reference to historiography (White 1978), philosophical writing (Norris 1983), sociology (Edmondson 1984), and the human sciences generally (Simons 1989). I have used it myself in a volume on literature and social psychology (Potter, Stringer, and Wetherell 1984) for an analysis of the ‘reading practice’ of the social psychologist, Irving Janis, as revealed through his Victims of Groupthink.

Any written text is of interest because texts are one of the forms of discourse of which social psychology consists. Discourse is both the content and medium of social psychology. For this reason, no social psychological text can be interpreted as a straightforward, literal account of its subject matter. Texts are persuasive; and a writer’s principal aim, and difficulty, is to produce a simple, coherent account which will persuade the reader of its acceptability – that that is indeed how matters stand. Of particular interest is the means by which persuasiveness is constructed. Arguments at various points in this volume suggest that writing a persuasive social psychological textbook, within the mainstream of the discipline, would be an unusually difficult project, because of the complexity, incoherence, and reflexivity of social psychological material.

Another feature of the broad approach followed in this chapter is a refusal to allow certain kinds of text to take a privileged position. Thus, textbooks may be taken as being as significant as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, if one wants to understand what social psychology is about and how it works. Even the sociology of science, which is interested in the procedures of academic practice, has tended to ignore textbooks as a source of material. It has privileged empirical and theoretical research reports over other texts as data for study, and has treated research as more fundamental than teaching.

Textbooks

The number of social psychology textbooks which appeared in 1976–81 is fairly remarkable – there were probably more than the thirty at which I looked. Social psychology is clearly presented to relatively large numbers of students through that medium. If your reaction is that texts of this kind are insignificant or trivial to the discipline, then you are both discounting the experience of many hundreds of thousands of people, and ignoring the wider aspects of the representation of social psychology. North American textbooks are probably the medium for a large part of the social psychology which is taught throughout the world.

The importance of this latter point is reflected in the interesting argument of Moghaddam (1987) that there are Three Worlds of Psychology, with unequal capacities for producing and disseminating psychological knowledge. The first consists of the United States and the Soviet Union. He interprets the ‘crisis’ in western social psychology as partly arising from an attempt by (some parts of) the second world – developed countries – to establish a social psychology which is independent of the United States. A Third-World psychology has to challenge the domination by the other two worlds in Third-World developing countries. Textbooks and their contents are one means by which domination is exercised.

Yet a revolutionary textbook which deliberately seeks to undermine the received versions seems to be a difficult notion to accept. Both Gergen and Sampson, for example, have in their writings made striking contributions to the reformulation of social psychology; but they have produced textbooks which depart rather little from the basic form and content of their competitors. More critical approaches to social psychology (e.g. Archibald 1978; Wexler 1983) tend to come from a predominantly sociological orientation. An exception is Antti Eskola’s (1971) textbook. It has been translated into Dutch and reprinted several times in the Netherlands; but not, I believe, into English. This book, however, should not lead us to believe that ‘normal’ social psychology textbooks are as innocent as they appear. Like all texts, they seek with particular devices to persuade readers of the relevance, interest, and validity of their own perspective on human affairs. They can be treated as constructing a version of social reality for their readers, just as much as conveying the elements of a discipline for analysing social life.

The examination of textbooks as instruments for teaching psychology is not intended to throw light upon teaching as a separate activity within the discipline, but on something which in academic institutions constitutes an essential element of its practice; and through that, on the nature of social psychological practice itself. Textbooks reveal some of the personal and social contingencies, which, in addition to the theories and investigations which are foregrounded on their pages, go to make up ‘what social psychology is’.

Textbooks work at two levels at least. They seek explicitly to give a comprehensible account of the discipline: they formally, and with claims to expertise, say what social psychology is and what social psychologists have achieved. They are presented as if they were direct and privileged descriptions of what the writer’s fellow-scientists had done and seen. Yet for many reasons they cannot have that status. For example, their variability – which is something other than their relative (in-)accuracy – refutes it. They are many steps removed from the ultimate subject which they purport to explain. To mention only a few of those removes: they refer to books and articles which may be summaries of other texts, which refer to results, which are drawn from data, which are elicited from subjects.

In the accounting process, and in their own practice of social psychology, textbooks give an alternative set of (covert) information about its nature. The authoritative content of textbooks may of necessity be of interest to students; but here their ‘how’ rather than their ‘what’ is more important. A textbook is a constructed, organised text, selectively using particular means of discourse to produce its interpretative effect. Under analysis, it can throw light on the way in which social psychologists make sense of and interpret their discipline, not by paying attention straight-forwardly to their formal and self-conscious claims, but by examining their mode of discourse in the social contexts which a textbook and its use encapsulates. While discourse is the subject-matter of social psychology, the discourse of social psychologists is both subject and meta-subject.

The discourse of the textbook is not ‘caused’ by its writer or by the subject-matter itself, but by the generalised attempt to present coherent, seamless accounts. This attempt may be peculiarly difficult in the case of textbooks. For students demand that these authorities facilitate as far as possible their access to and retention of that information which effectively will serve as a medium for advancing their social position. It is this demand, though not its motive, which is reflected in the preface to nearly every textbook. Textbooks are interesting texts, in a context of deconstruction, because their prefaces uniformly and often explicitly refer to difficulties of the author. Through their preface they thematise their problematical status; and thus, in principle, are readily open to deconstruction.

Disclaimers

At this point, several disclaimers need to be made. It should by now be clear that when, in what follows, examples of problems from textbooks are cited, there is no wish to ‘criticise’ the authors. We are only revealing ways in which they failed to carry out an impossible task; and even then we have no interest here in agency. We pay no attention to such aspects as the usefulness, quality, or accuracy of a certain textbook or of textbooks in general. Textbooks may be produced to make money for the writers and publishers; but that does not, as such, invalidate their claims to represent a part of a discipline. No more does a view of them as socialising agents or an imperialistic operation.

There are many ways in which one might examine the discourse of social psychology textbooks; of how they go about the attempt to produce an impression of generalised truth or reality behind (or in front of!) multiple and incoherent models and empirical studies. One might, for example, examine how they variously interpret identical sources or similar topics; and the variation might be analysed historically or culturally. But here we will simple-mindedly begin at the beginning of the textbook itself, and focus our reading on the preface, against a background of what the main text contains.

PREFACES

The dictionary defines ‘preface’, beyond its original liturgical meaning, as an introduction to a literary work, usually explaining its subject, purpose, scope, and method. Textbooks of social psychology would scarcely count as works of literature. (Is The Social Animal still the only example which one could perhaps imagine people wanting to read as a book, and not just as a textbook?) And their prefaces are better seen as justifying aspects of the main text, even though the justifications may often be couched as explanations. If a preface is read as explanation, it will strongly suggest to the reader what should be found in the main text, rather than encourage the reader to construct his or her own reading. It will appear to offer the definitive version of the writer’s intentions, and thereby resist alternative interpretations. In the case of textbooks, a preface may even give quite detailed instructions on how to make sense of and assimilate its material.

Unlike the liturgical preface – a prelude to the central part of the Eucharist – a preface pretends to stand aloof from the main text. Its status as an introduction is frequently denied by the presence of another text which is labelled ‘Introduction’. As a result the preface may be treated as quite peripheral, and be ignored. If it is read, it will probably be taken as a legitimate and authoritative commentary on the main text, rather than as being implicated in it. In a textbook, the author uses it as a means of distancing himself from and objectifying the reality of the account which follows.

At one level, prefaces are interesting as a rare form of discourse, one in which social psychologists interpret and justify a part of their own practice: in this case, making sense of social life for their students – even though one can also see their endeavour as one of making sense for themselves of social psychology. The preface is a particularly concentrated and explicit set of justifications, and one which is often couched in quite personal terms. At another level, the justifications should challenge the reader to look for the criticisms which they are implicitly fending off. But the student may be particularly unwilling to do this when preparing to read ‘the textbook’; the student dare not have it undermined. Or again, a preface can be read in order to provide pointers as to how texts are constructed, both from the viewpoint of the self-conscious author, and in a more deconstructive manner. The preface seems to recognise and make explicit what would be necessary to produce a simple, coherent text, if that were ever possible.

Prefaces do not contain definitive statements about what they preface, but persuasive ones. They need to be ‘accepted’. Precisely because of their justificatory and pedagogic goals, because of their self-conscious and concentrated enunciation of the coherence and reasonableness of what follows, they are a most useful analytic basis for deconstructing the plausibilities of the main text They may conceal contradiction between themselves and what they preface; internal inconsistencies and incongruities; and a dichotomising tendency which ultimately points to the undesired incoherence and fragmentation of the main text. Each of these features reveals crucial resources of organisation used in the impossible task of producing a simple, coherent text.

On the surface the prefaces to social psychology textbooks may seem straightforward, perhaps rather boring, and certainly restrained, appeals for one to attend to their own rather than another competing book’s message. The content is rather standardised, to the extent that one can readily produce a stereotyped version of it. It begins with a statement that social psychology is about everyday social life, and is of personal relevance to every student. The discipline is in a period of considerable growth and change, demanding the incorporation, perhaps in what is a revised edition of an earlier textbook, of much up-to-date material. One innovation frequently claimed is a greater attention to applications of social psychology. At the same time, it is argued, social psychology has scholarly, theoretical and classical bases which cannot properly be ignored, despite the complexity which they may sometimes introduce. To overcome the complexity, a number of special teaching aids are adopted – a logical organisation, a clear style, boxed inserts, liberal illustrations, summaries and glossaries. In nearly al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART ONE: TEXTS AND RHETORIC
• PART TWO: POWER AND SCIENCE
• PART THREE: SUBJECTIVITY AND INDIVIDUALITY
• References
• Index