W1 L2: Histories of Social Psychology

NOT ASSESSED

black history of psyhcology

  • fighting against belief that black people were inferior (intellectually)

  • Allport’s history US-centric - centered also on white narratives

  • reviews provided by Holliday (2009) and Guthride (1976)

  • early 20th century - white narritive, AA colleges provide primary base for black psychology, focused on rebutting scientific racism (see also Guthride, 1976, part 1)

  • gread depression: opens the idea of context, shapping attitudes , mental health and bhv

feminist history

  • “great man” theory - theories of leadership, manly men

  • womans contributions are often overlooked or minimalised at the time and in future historical accounts

  • eg. Carolyn Wood, Manie Phipps Clark (supreme court used her research and her superior is more recognised for it than her)

  • young & hegarty (2019) - “A partial history of social psychology’s masculinist scientific culture”

  • explore the different ‘roles’ of sexual harassment in sicaol psychology: experiement manipulation (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Bramel, 1963), field study, experience of woman researchers

  • Margaret Wetherell, founder of discursive psychology

the loss of the social

  • crisis in social psychology - cost of cognitive and experimental focus

  • WIERD-ness in social psychology

  • eg. Rom Harre, Margaret Wetherell, Kenneth & Mary Gergen, Ian Parker

  • trying to move away from experimental methods

critical social psychology

  • how we ask and frame questions

  • Questioning existing understandings of the nature of ‘psychological’ reality (ontology)

  • Questioning ‘acceptable’ ways of accessing and producing knowledge of that reality (epistemology)

  • a concern for social justice and power

  • how we construct the problem is the problem

discursive psychology

  • concerned with how ‘things’ are positioned and constructed, using language – language as a tool, vs. language as a container for ideas

  • making choices about language in order to do something

  • eg. therapy session with perpetrators (rapers) - used languague to position victim as partly reponsible and invoke cultural discourses around blurred lines in order to justify their actions

WEIRD-ness in social psychology

  • Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic societies

  • only 12% of the worlds population, 96% of psychological research is based on this 12% of the world’s population

  • treated as the norm, generalised

  • broadly accepted terms from WEIRD samples

the replication crisis

  • 2010s: Series of scandals, crises, findings, that drawn together suggest many findings in psychology are not reproducible

  • why do we care?

  • Big name fraud: Diederik Stapel

    One of the messiest areas to replicate? (ManyLabs, Klein et al, 2014; ManyLabs4, Klein et al., 2022)

  • really affects our findings

the rise of open science

  • Rising importance of replication, transparency and open science practices (e.g., pre-registration, data sharing; Earp & Trafimow, 2015)