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Psychology and History volumeChapter outline by Mark Knights, University of Warwick Mark Knights is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. He is the author (amongst other works) of Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (OUP, 2005) and The Devil in Disguise (OUP, 2011), both of which consider partisan publics and the construction of stereotypes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Historical stereotypes and histories of stereotypes History and social psychology share interests in the public sphere, the arts of persuasion and the formation of attitudes. As a result, both disciplines are interested in the construction, manipulation, dissemination and evolution of stereotypes and the prejudices on which they feed. The first section of this chapter outlines themes, conclusions and approaches drawn from psychology that might be particularly useful for historical analysis. Much of the social psychology literature about stereotyping should be of significant interest to historians, even though, it seems, it is seldom used by them. I shall then examine historical approaches to stereotyping and highlight some of the benefits of using historical data, which, in turn, is strikingly absent from most of the published social psychology work in the field. At one time the social sciences and history drew frequently on one another; now, that relationship, at least so far as psychology is concerned, seems more distant, though there are good reasons for thinking that some sort of rapprochement may be taking place and this chapter seeks to foster that process. 1 The final section of the chapter will take a case study, the stereotypes of reform and reformers in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, in order to bring the two approaches together, and also to show how an even broader inter-disciplinary approach, integrating visual and linguistic concerns, might be a productive way forward.
ISocial pyschologists seem agreed that stereotyping is a by-product of normal cognitive processes that help us to order, simplify and hence better understand the complex world around us. 2 A stereotype is thus simply an association of attributes with a certain group of