100% satisfaction guarantee Immediately available after payment Both online and in PDF No strings attached
logo-home
Previously searched by you
Previously searched by you
logo
Summary Critical Social Psychology: The Critical Context £3.34
Add to cart
Quickly navigate to
Preview
  2.  
  3. University Of The Witwatersrand (wits)
  4.  
  5. Psychology (PSYC3019A)

Summary

Summary Critical Social Psychology: The Critical Context
 0 purchase
  • Module
  • Psychology (PSYC3019A)
  • Institution
  • University Of The Witwatersrand (wits)
  • Book
  • An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology

This is a summary of the book chapter: Introduction to Critical Social Psychology by Alexa Hepburn. The chapter title is: The Critical Context. This document summarizes the content of this reading providing a comprehensive understanding. Additional definitions are also used to aid in the complexi...

[Show more]

Preview 2 out of 5  pages

Document information

  • No
  • 1
  • August 4, 2023
  • 5
  • 2023/2024
  • Summary

Subjects

  • critical social psychology

Connected book

book image

Book Title:

Author(s):

  • Edition:
  • ISBN:
  • Edition:

Written for

  • University of the Witwatersrand (wits)
  • Psychology (PSYC3019A)
All documents for this subject (16)

Seller

avatar-seller
tiffanyjanewilton

Content preview

→ Virtually any piece of social psychology is critical of something even if it is just another piece of
research or another researcher.
→ What is distinctive about critical social psychology is the breadth of its critical concerns.
→ For critical social psychology, research is locked in with issues of politics, morality and social
change.
→ It starts from fundamental concerns with oppression, exploitation and human well-being.


• Critical of society (or some of its elements).
• Critical of psychology itself: asks questions about its assumptions, practices and its broader
influences.
• Critical of social psychology.
• Dual task of criticizing society and criticizing the discipline of psychology.
• The tension between these two projects provides CSP with its current character.

Critical thinking - the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to
form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation.
Criticism – what you may have experienced when you had an exchange with someone and you felt
the feedback to be personal, destructive, vague, inexpert, ignorant, or even selfish.
Critique - impersonal, constructive, specific, expert, informed and selfless.



To highlight the way critical work is dependent on a range of assumptions that are not always made
explicit. Three groups of assumptions are most fundamental.
1. The first concerns the nature of society: how it works and how it can be changed.
2. The second concerns knowledge: how it changes, how it is justified, how ‘solid’ it is.
3. The third concerns the person: how personhood and subjectivity are understood.
• SOCIETY: race, class, gender
• KNOWLEDGE: psychology itself Understanding all these topics in our South African context
• SUBJECTIVITY: our “selves”



• Society- an obvious thing, something that we are part of and that exists ‘out there’.
→ But society is a relatively recent term; it is a theorized way of understanding, how people
collect together.
→ ‘Society’ is connected with an assortment of ideas and practices: social and political
institutions, the economy, social groups and classes, political procedures.
→ We can ‘see’ these things with the aid of a developed set of notions from social and political
science that have become part of our everyday currency.
→ One major alternative we could consider is culture- would emphasize the symbolic and ritual
side of human life.
TJW NOTES

, → For a critical social psychologist the problem with the notion of culture is its organic, timeless
connotations.
→ Society, with its associated thesaurus of notions, is a way of constructing stuff that makes it
more malleable, makes it something that can be transformed or overturned.


• One of the crucial things marking out different views of society is how they view individuals.
• Liberal models of society tend to take the individual as logically prior to society.
• Thus, society will be fair if it allows people the freedom to pursue their own goals.
• From a critical perspective, adopting a liberal view will lead to emphasis on tackling problems at
an individual level rather than focusing on political structures and institutions.
• The critical aim is the emancipation of the individual.
• Sees group processes as independent of broader political structures and institutions.
• Eg. Most social psychology texts.
• Critical social psychology is usually suspicious of the liberal individualist view of society.

LIBERALISM
⇒ an attitude characterized by acceptance of alternative, even noncompliant, forms of thinking or
acting and sometimes (but not necessarily or fully) by advocacy of change to the status quo and
tradition.
⇒ historically, a broad political philosophy emphasizing individual freedom, constitutional
government, and social progress through open debate and the pragmatic reform of existing
institutions and laws.



• Marxist theories of society emphasize the importance of historical change, and the centrality of
class conflict.
• In particular, social class is seen as a fundamental factor in making sense of social structures–
power relations are often understood in terms of class relations.
• From a Marxist perspective, to be critical and political necessarily involves particular ways of
making sense of social structures and institutions.
• The institutionally supported structures of power are often viewed as pre-discursive–they exist as
part of the ‘real’–so we can start to see how a theory of knowledge (e.g. realist versus relativist)
impacts on our understanding of society and social change.
• If social structures can simply exist outside our ways of making sense of them, we are forced into
thinking about personhood in particular ways.
• These tensions between what is individual and social, what is real and discursive, provide a great
deal of dynamism and debate for critical social psychologists.
• Society precedes the individual.


• A postmodern theory of society is a way of characterizing contemporary society and the
degeneration of capitalism and modernity.
• This emphasizes the importance of the move away from mass industrial production towards new
information-based technology in which control of communication is paramount.
• Focuses on language and communication.
• Unlike Marxism, critical analysis presupposes no primary political structures; unlike liberalism, the
individual is not assumed to be prior to social and institutional structures.
→ Sees social institutions as constituted through language.
TJW NOTES

The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:

Guaranteed quality through customer reviews

Guaranteed quality through customer reviews

Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.

Quick and easy check-out

Quick and easy check-out

You can quickly pay through credit card for the summaries. There is no membership needed.

Focus on what matters

Focus on what matters

Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!

Frequently asked questions

What do I get when I buy this document?

You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.

Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?

Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.

Who am I buying these notes from?

Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller tiffanyjanewilton. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.

Will I be stuck with a subscription?

No, you only buy these notes for £3.34. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.

Can Stuvia be trusted?

4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)

69052 documents were sold in the last 30 days

Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy revision notes and other study material for 15 years now

Start selling
£3.34
  • (0)
Add to cart
Added