Individual-Society Dualism - Critical Social Psychology (7/30)

individual society dualism is the most enduring theme in social psychology but it's a problem it's social psychologies biggest problem may be the tendency to think on the one hand that things are produced by individual action that individuals have clear boundaries that they're not linked to others that they're autonomous that they are rational decision makers who are not unduly influenced by the world around them on the other hand there are ways of thinking in social psychology which say yes but influences from social the social sphere are so so pressured so heavy so influential that people are not really just the single individual they are so connected to and influenced by social forces one of the things we're saying in this course is that such a dichotomy dichotomies are actually never helpful and this is is a really unproductive dichotomy so to focus only on the individual without recognizing that they're always inextricably linked with society with the social is not really very helpful it's not productive at all we as a discipline are perched right in that gap are we there to explain individuals or are we there to explain how they function in the wider society and the standard definition of social psychology is the study of individuals in their social context and so it's about putting those two things together and any framework that actually tends to say things that either do to individuals or do to social forces actually pulls apart what we are trying to build a bridge between take the example of people becoming students in higher education now I've done a piece of research with Caroline Kelly who is also part of this course which is on mature students those students are terrified when they become students they think they'll be found out but they're not clever enough there are all sorts of things that they don't know now that sounds as if it's very individual as if this person has brought with them their own shortcomings their own fears and it's all just individual but of course this is in a context where there are social expectations about what it is to be a student and we're from society they've got notions of what students should be like what they should admit to and therefore the very fact that they feel not so confident means that they feel that they're not a proper student the two things are indivisible what they've got from society what they see around them and what they bring so individual and social always together

Channel: OpenLearn from The Open University

Views: 26,008

Keywords: unconscious, conscious, emotion, social, society, context, desire, qualitative, interpretive, theory, identity, psyche, environment, feelings, ou_DD307, open university

Id: fr2PGbHHCWg

Length: 3min 11sec (191 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2011