Social psychology: Social or psychological?

Abstract

The problematic nature of the subject-object relation in psychology was noted as early as 1933, by Rosenweig. Bentley (1937) noted '. . .(the) experiment prospered in the sense of the physicist and the physiologist but to the neglect of the organism regarded as an active and relatively independent living physical system and of certain of its operations' (p. 457). Concern with the consequent issues was not taken up seriously until relatively late in the history of experimentation in psychology (

Notes towards a description of Social Representations

“…There they act upon and are objectified in relationships and behaviours without our realizing it. They are reinvigorated and brought to the surface in a new guise by the scientific theories, whose terminology and methods differ from the ones applied in our daily life (Semin, 1987).…”

“…They all provide a stock of learned behaviour or ideas with which to face the needs of daily life. These categorization processes are of great interest, especially those involving prototypes (Semin, 1987), because they reformulate in terms of information theory processes that are very familiar to social psychology, first and foremost the process of categorization or stereotyping (Billig, 1986).…”

A gloss on attribution theory

“…The weak line is that the attribution theorist takes as his point of departure end-products of explanation in everyday life and imputes processes of a supposedly psychological nature to explain how these products are achieved. sources which can potentially account for the regularities in the dependent-independent variable relationship are manifold as long as the distinction between the social and the psychological properties of social behaviour are not clearly made (Semin & Manstead, 1979). The social properties of social behaviour are regarded as those rules, conventions and norms that are potent guides for behaviour regularities.…”

“…Generally rule systems themselves contain explanations or accounts for the people acting 'in rule', such that interlocutors have their socially defined 'invariant motives ' (cf. Schutz, 1953;Semin & Manstead, 1979). These rule systems enable the invariant attribution of motives, and posing the question 'why?'…”

“…Peters, 1969) for a variety of settings and behaviours in such settings. The social in social behaviour refers to a collection of 'conventions' created and adopted by a collectivity and as such is objectivated and anonymous (Semin & Manstead, 1979). This common stock of knowledge at hand enables the individuals belonging to the collectivity to jointly construct and maintain a mutual social reality.…”