Contemporary Issues in Psychology Notes

Introduction to the Module

  • The module explores contemporary issues in social psychology related to media and technology's effects.
  • Topics include well-being, body image, beliefs, selfie-taking, and celebrity worship.
  • Module aims to make psychology approachable for students immersed in social media and technology.
  • The goal is to make students aware of the importance of psychology in understanding the impact of media and technology on behavior and well-being.
  • Assessment:
    • Grant proposal (50%): 1500 words on a contemporary social psychological issue's effect on behavior or well-being (Deadline: 01/05/2025).
    • Final exam (50%): Answer two questions from a choice of five.

Contemporary Issues in Social Psychology

  • People are increasingly dependent on technology and digital media which has accelerated due to COVID-19.
  • This dependence has led to a growing sense of alienation from others and nature, as depicted in "The Machine Stops."
  • E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) presents a prophetic view of a future where humanity is totally dependent on technology and lives in isolation.
  • Digital communication is often easier than face-to-face interaction because social interactions are demanding.

Social Media Paradox

  • Social media usage paradox: brains are built for social connections, but using smartphones to connect can lead to unhappiness, loneliness, and depression.
  • Teens who spend more time seeing friends, exercising, playing sports, attending religious services, reading, and doing homework are happier.
  • Teens spending more time on the internet, playing computer games, on social media, texting, using video chat, or watching TV are less happy.
  • Psychological well-being decreased after 2012, coinciding with increased smartphone sales worldwide.

Reality TV and Celebrity Worship

  • Raises questions about whether enjoyment comes from watching others suffer or being humiliated.
  • Parasocial interaction: a one-sided "bond" with a media figure.
  • Instinct as social animals to follow the leader plays a role in celebrity worship.
  • Celebrity status often leads to “god-like” qualities, blurring the line between good and bad, leading to people taking sides, romanticising convicted serial killers.
  • Number of people killed while taking selfies TRIPLES after lockdown lifts.

Big Data in Psychology

  • Psychologists use big data to understand people better by analyzing internet searches to understand the underlying assumptions and trends.
  • Spotify uses big data and machine learning algorithms to predict a user's next favorite song based on their listening history and user playlists.
  • Big Data projects include:
    • Improving healthcare by analyzing medical records and images.
    • Predicting and responding to natural and man-made disasters using sensor data.
    • Preventing crime through data-driven strategies by police forces.

Critical Approaches to the Body and Society

  • Examines aesthetics, function, and social perceptions of bodies in contemporary society.
  • Raises questions about whose bodies are being governed and controlled, highlighting the social meaning attached to bodies.

Negotiating 'Truth' in Society

  • Living in an era where truth is complicated, with multiple perspectives and narratives.
  • Post-truth: circumstances where objective facts are less influential than emotion and personal belief.
  • Negative impacts: fake news, alternative facts, superstition, moral panics. Positive impacts: pluralism, tolerance, awareness of diverse perspectives.
  • Contemporary causes: misinformation, rejection of well-established claims, declining trust in institutions, fragmentation of information consumption.
  • Factors:
    • Socio-technological factors (social media).
    • Political factors (misinformation).
    • Economic factors (corporate interests).
    • Scientific factors (replication crisis).
  • Psychology of alternative truths theorized through cognitive and socio-affective approaches.

Social Representations, the Body, & the Media

  • Explores histories of social psychology, critical social psychology, social representation, social construction and discourse about the body
  • Traditional social psychology uses the scientific method to understand social phenomena.
  • Critical social psychology acknowledges scientific method but accepts its limitations.
  • Critical psychology views individuals as intentional actors with free will, while traditional psychology views individuals as products of innate instinct.
  • Critical social psychology moves beyond essentialist and mechanistic explanations of the body, acknowledging social and personal forces articulated through language.
  • Social constructionism explores how knowledge, meaning, and social realities are created through social interactions and cultural practices.

Key Thinkers

  • Michel Foucault: explored how power and knowledge intertwine to define social norms.
  • Kenneth J. Gergen: emphasizes the role of discourse in shaping personal identity and societal norms.
  • Vivian Burr: provides an accessible overview of social constructionism and its implications for critical thinking and research.

Discourse

  • Discourses are packets of knowledge/assumptions/norms that we take up and use within our day-to-day lives.
  • Media and advertising act as vehicles for creating discourses, playing with discourses and commodity activism.
  • Particular sets of ideas and understandings (discourses) become dominant in spatial and temporal contexts becomes embedded, institutionalized.
  • Critical task of CDA is to identify, examine, and expose the discourses and discursive mechanisms via which inequality and oppression is produced and reproduced
  • Ian Hacking: Dynamic Nominalism: Categories of people come into existence simultaneously with the labeling of those categories. Looping Effects: How classifications affect the people classified, which in turn changes the classification itself.

Foucalt & Discourse

  • Discourse has a social, cultural, and historical focus – not interested in the individual (unlike, for instance, social interactionism).
  • Discourse is constructive of existing ‘realities’ / ‘truths’ – thus a mechanism of social constructionism. Where did you get your beliefs from?
  • People can resist discourse, but even this resistance is often framed within the discourse itself. So, can we ever escape discourse?

Neoliberalism

  • health an individual concern – a normal and natural concern commercialisation of the body ‘Fat’ / ‘unfit’ / unfunctional / inefficient body as anti-neoliberalist & subject to denigration Individual Responsibility for Wellbeing self-reliance, self-management, individual determination are critical to success
  • Medical health is often depoliticised and addressed through medical treatments rather than tackling systemic causes like poverty, discrimination, or housing insecurity.
  • Neoliberal values influence digital platforms, where mental health awareness campaigns coexist with pressures for curated self- presentation, contributing to anxiety and low self-esteem.

Foucauldian Bodies

  • We cannot necessarily escape discourse, but discourses co-exist change through the engaging with marginalised and repressed discourses Foucauldian theory – the body is entirely constituted through discourse Discourses act as the link between daily practices around the body and structures of power shift to focus on the individual and a focus on the body
  • Object- is the person, place, or thing that is in receipt discourse Subject- the person, place, or thing that (re)produces the discourse discourse is also interested in intended and unintended outcomes how much do you control the consequences of your actions

Social Media & the Observed Body

  • The body as a social space negotiated on social media Interesting point of focus user-created content awareness of the observation and monitoring of self and others We are both the observers and the observed; the judge and the judged; the creators and the created
  • IMPRESSION MANAGEMENTSocial media as the manipulation of cues to cultivate a particular image of self Awareness of audience & performativity of self
  • The PanopticonFoucault post-structuralist, interested in questioning structures of power & regulation- content uploaded strategically with watcher in mind; governmentality Power is scattered and thus discretePower of observation, docile bodies, & self-governance
  • The driving ethos of individual as responsible has been applied to a number of personal circumstances, New technologies provide the opportunity to institute new practices, still steeped in existing power structures, for self-construction New technologies offer options for further self-reflection and continued construction of the self Responsibilised practices showcased on social media and thus reified selfie’s performances of traditional femininity
  • GillFoucauldian beauty apps as a technology of gender, designed to encourage self-monitoring intensified and exaggerated psychological acceptance of the gaze and surveillance The gaze and surveillance is becoming more fine-grained’Nano surveillance”of appearance as normative
  • HealthismHealth is a form of technology as an individual concern- people and populations are made responsible for their healthOnline trend Impact on body satisfaction and exercise is influenced by individualcharacteristics being a consequence of ‘good’ self-management and individual achievement
  • Body as aproject- to work on and ‘improve, to maintain ConsumerismIncreased observation of own and others bodies. During lockdown, closure of gyms à home exercise that have a stress of pandemic Public-health fuelled concerns overhealth proliferation of weight-loss related content on social media

Neoliberalism and Beyond

  • Neo-liberal bodies-selfiesiNeoliberalismWe have discussed how neoliberalismcan impact on our behaviour, and how selfie-taking can become totemic of who we are, and the social expectations we do or do not adhere to we think about our bodies and the bodies of othersSocial media is a space to build/represent/maintain/advance the social norms, expectations, and practices reinforce practices of self-governance to transform and/or maintain
  • BiopowerMichel Foucault's concept