S2W6Crit Flashcards
Mainstream
SIT and social cognition.
Focus on artificial groups and imaginary situations
Experiments
Psychometric scales
Statistics (quantitative)
Critical
Deconstructing taken for granted phenomena
Focus on real world social interaction (slight resistance against using interviews)
Qualitative methods
Marxism
Promotes individualism
Need to study the influence of social class and power inequalities
Psychology should be about social change
Feminism
Psychology traditionally represents white, male, middle class heterosexuals
Challenged some core assumptions of the discipline
Psychoanalysis
Freud would be critical of mainstream
Modern culture is narcissistic – no longer the individual
Psychoanalysis inspired rise of psychosocial studies
Social constructionism
Importance of history in shaping psychological phenomena
Importance of language in shaping social experience
Discursive psychology reflects these concerns
Danziger (1990)
How research methodology (experimental) has shaped what we know.
Theory of Mind experiments (knowledge of autism has come from these whereas actually it has a more language based element).
Dragged the field of autism towards TOM.
Rose (1985)
How the emergence of the psy industries influenced society.
Psy – psychology, psychiatry
E.g. cost of mental health.
Cost of treating dementia influential on health policies
Developmental disorders influential on education policies.
Armistead (1974) crisis
Blindly following natural sciences model
Too much desperation for psychology to be called science too get funding.
Causes over-reliance on statistics and experiments
Fails to engage with real world
Ethogenic approach
Tries to address critical concerns
Based on ethnography (study of social interaction and groups).
Hard to publish in journals so didn’t catch on.
Individual in society
Distinction between the individual and society too strict in mainstream.
Looks at intentions rather than behaviour.
Doesn’t observe people in social situations.
Locates self, or brain, as source of distress.
Poor prognosis of mental health in West as urban environment biggest stressor.
Cost in terms of lack of productivity rather than the distress of the individual.
Timeless and universal
Mainstream looks only at things that are consistent across situations and across time
There are few (if any) aspects of psychology that are truly timeless and universal.
Even attitudes change.
Isolating behaviours
Isolating a behaviour as an experimental variable ignores the historical/cultural context.
Milgram: tried to isolate all variables apart from obedience to see why people are obedient to Hitler.
Asch: isolated conformity to ‘do people go along with majority’ but participants unaware of what they were conforming too.
Reduces human nature to something that can be observed in a lab.
The rhetoric of ‘truth’ claims
How something becomes true may be more due to rhetoric it is wrapped in rather than thing itself
Science full of rhetorical figures that produce facts e.g. hypothesis testing.
Easy to dismiss critics as unscientific fwhen they don’t follow convention.
Health psychology challenges
Biggest grants if you follow NHS.
If you wanted to challenge CBT’s effectiveness you wouldn’t get funding.
If they don’t want the research to take place they won’t fund it.
Child psychology challenges
Attachment theory unchallenged as it is difficult to get funding
Wetherell (challenges to social psychology)
Take social bit seriously.
Prejudice more than faulty cognition
Self less important than social norms
Gender and sexuality not determined by biological sex
Research not just about serving governmental interests
Social psychology not dictated by traditional topics (e.g. attitudes)
Examples of critical psychology
Gray: dangers of medicating ADHD children with ritalin.
Gough: celebrate obesity
Fine: neuropsychology not just about neuro
Blood: internalising body images seen in photos
Binkley: positive psychology as a form of government control.
Billig (2002): criticism of Tajfel
Critique of Tajfel’s cognitive theory.
Argued that prejudice is too bland a term for racial hatred.
Tajfel doesn’t explain how people go from everyday prejudice to extreme hatred (Nazis).
Bigotry a better word.
Tajfel’s theory incapable of addressing original concerns.
Billig alternative explanations
Hatred requires emotion.
Hatred contained within language use.
Dehuminisation (Nazis) comes from product of talk.
Actions and words not a sign of hatred but are actual hatred.
Taboos around racism create forbidden pleasure (trolling).
Responses to Billig
Frosh:
Psychoanalytic
Projection of feared self on to outgroup.
Brown (2002):
Too specific – need theory that catches universal rules/processes
Overfocus on language leads us to lose sight of the cognitive aspects
Billig’s reply: that’s what led social psychology into crisis
