Social Psychological Analysis Research Articles

For love or money? Couples’ negotiations of credit and debt in low-income families in the UK

Building on earlier work on the household economy, and drawing on a longitudinal study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this article discusses the role of gender dynamics in experiences of credit and debt in low-income families in the UK. Following critiques of traditional sociological and social psychological analyses of the household economy, it takes a more discursive approach, which reveals the significance and ‘playing out’ of gender relations within decision making in this area of practice.

The effect of community identification on attitude and intention toward a blogging community

PurposeInternet portals have long been providing free services (e.g. e‐mail, blog) to attract new users and retain existing customers. However, it is uncertain whether the users will continue to use the present free service over time. Blog enables people to interact with others extensively and the population of blog users has been skyrocketing in recent years. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of virtual community on a user's attitude and intention to continually use the current blog service.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual empirical model has been developed on the foundation of social psychology, relationship marketing, and transaction cost analysis (TCA). Users of blogging communities who have frequent experience of interacting with other members were the objects for this study. In total, 243 valid samples were obtained for empirical testing by employing structural equation model.FindingsResults show that asset specificity and community pressure play mediating roles in the relationship between community identification and attitude toward using blog services, which in turn affects intention to stay with a blogging community. Perceived usefulness is successful in determining the attitude of using blogging community.Originality/valueThis paper is believed to be the first that uses a sociology view of community and asset specificity to investigate its impacts on online consumer loyalty. The study advances the relationship marketing literature in explaining user's new service adoption behavior by adding community identity and community pressure generated through the process of using web‐based services. The paper concludes with implications for web‐based service providers, and additional extended research relevant to the study of virtual community and asset specificity is also provided.

Intergenerational differences in values and dioxin risk perceptions in South Korea

PurposeThe objectives of the research are to examine the differences among generations in South Korea in values or worldview (measured by the feeling of Connectedness‐to‐Nature Scale (CNS)) and the intervening effects of the worldview on perceptions and behaviors in relation to and in response to the complex risk of dioxins – the unpleasant by‐products of the modern wasteful cultures.Design/methodology/approachA quasi‐experimental survey method was designed based on the content analysis of the media coverage on dioxin risk in Korea. The variables examined for this research include awareness, risk knowledge, the affective connectedness to nature worldview, opinion of management methods, and willingness‐to‐act (WTA) behaviors. An in‐person‐type survey administration was conducted on individuals from different social backgrounds in the city of Jeonju, Korea.FindingsThe findings show that there are no significant effects of age on one's awareness and knowledge of dioxin risk. However, the older respondents show significantly higher CNS, societal‐level WTA, and recycling behaviors.Research limitations/implicationsThe implications include that the traditional Korean worldview, which emphasizes oneness or connectedness between humans and nature, does not disappear and infact significantly influences the perceptions and behaviors of the older Koreans. It is possible to assume that the younger Koreans are relatively less influenced by this worldview. However, additional tests across society are necessary for obtaining some generalization.Originality/valueThe originality or value of the study is that it systematically produces a social psychological analysis of the long‐term complex risk for individuals other than North Americans.

Striking civilian targets during the Lebanon war—A social psychological analysis of Israeli decision makers.

This article examines the socio-psychological mechanisms that guided decisions of the Israeli leadership to attack the civilian infrastructure during the Lebanon war in 2006. Based on reports by the Israeli governmental commission for the war, known as the Winograd Committee, a correlation between the de-legitimization of Hezbollah and the willingness to deploy military tactics and strategies that resulted in civilian devastation was found. Relying on a new model of the sources of protracted violent conflicts advanced by Rothbart and Korostelina (2006) and content analysis tools relating to ingroup–outgroup positioning theory, this article offers three distinct narrative patterns exhibited by Israeli decision makers. Such patterns reveal and solidify normative boundaries between Israel and Lebanese civilians in ways that justified in Israeli minds the attacks against the Lebanese infrastructure.

Being Human: Relationships and You. A Social Psychological Analysis

Knud S. Larsen Reidar Ommundsen Kees van der Veer It would be redundant to say that the world we live in is not perfect. Our social life is often plagued by prejudice and discrimination, our social contacts frequently end up in some form of aggression, different persons or groups constantly try to persuade us to do things that serve them and may end up being harmful for us. At a larger scale history tends to repeat itself and the atrocities of the past – wars, torture, terrorism and genocide, to name just a few of the most damaging – describe the society of today as they did in the last centuries. On the other hand we encounter in our daily lives instances of cooperation and altruism, we see some people sacrificing themselves for the good of others and, at a macro level, see how nations try to work together in order to fight worldwide threats like global warming. The social world we live in is definitively a world of contrasts. How can we explain this “diversity”? How to make sense of crime and also of heroism? How do we make sense of ourselves? These are all central questions for the discipline of social psychology. Answers for questions like the above and for many other similar interrogations are put forward in the book “Being Human: Relationships and You. A Social Psychological Analysis”. Aimed to be a useful resource for students and scholars in social psychology, and more broadly in psychology, this text will certainly be of interest for social scientists in general and for all readers concerned with the intricacies of our social and psychological life.

Prologue

The goal of this introduction is to contextualize the multifaceted notion of commitment. It examines its conditions of use in ordinary language and in the research paradigms of pragmatics, social psychology, and discourse analysis. Particular attention is given to the microanalysis of commitment in ordinary language and in political discourse as well as to its subjective and intersubjective dimensions.

The Effect of Formal Policies and Informal Social Learning On Perceptions of Corporate Ethics: Actions Speak Louder than Codes

This research investigates how two cues in an organizational setting, codes of conduct and company responses to ethical transgressions, affect the kinds of inferences individuals make about the ethical climate of the company. The business community has adopted the legal approach, emphasizing that the ethical climate of a corporation can be effectively mandated in a code. However, social psychological analysis intuits that management can define the ethical climate more powerfully through their overt actions. Study 1 and Study 2 find that it is not so much the presence/absence or strength of a code but how a company responds to violations of the code that influences how ethical a company will be judged. Study 3 examined motives for establishing a code, and showed that a company was judged as more unethical when its code was motivated by situational constraints. Employees' ethical judgments are critical to their acceptance of ethical conduct.

Identity, practice and dialogue

AbstractIdentities are constructed and contested. This means they may be re‐worked to support more inclusive visions of who belongs and on what basis. However, identity construction does not take place in a vacuum, and social psychological analyses of change need to address the contextual dynamics that shape the processes and outcomes of dialogue. This requires attention to processes of power. Furthermore, we need to consider minority group members' understandings of these processes. From the perspective of the disadvantaged, dialogue may be experienced as disempowering because it is viewed as compromising group members' capacities to organize themselves to pursue strategies of social change. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Attitudes toward Immigrants, Immigration, and Multiculturalism in New Zealand: A Social Psychological Analysis

The research examines attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy based on a random sample of 2,020 New Zealand households. The analyses revealed that New Zealanders have positive attitudes toward immigrants and endorse multiculturalism to a greater extent than Australians and EU citizens. In addition, structural equation modeling produced an excellent fit of the data to a social psychological model commencing with multicultural ideology and intercultural contact as exogenous variables, leading, in turn, to diminished perceptions of threat, more positive attitudes toward immigrants, and, finally, support for New Zealand's policies on the number and sources of migrants.

Narrating and naming positive agents: Storytelling by Philadelphia postwar political elite

This paper connects research in social psychology, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis to develop two hypotheses about character description. Interviews conducted in the late 1970s with political elites of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA confirm predictions. Speakers describe co-group members as praiseworthy agents disproportionately, in comparison to out-group members, and refer to co-group members with individually specific language disproportionately. Extrapolating from research of similar practices in other contexts, the author explains why these two patterns may be important to identity formation. Images of positive agents are central to collective identity, so repeated stories portraying group members as such would reinforce those identities. Social psychological research suggests that specific, individual naming draws attention away from group identity; explicit group naming does the opposite. The use of individually specific names, rather than group names, may therefore mask the symbolic power created by the stories’ repeated descriptions of co-group members as positive agents. The language practice is both ubiquitous and opaque; it is common, and its power emerges from the aggregation of very short utterances. The combined practices of “narrating and naming” may exemplify the kind of misrecognition imagined by Pierre Bourdieu and Passeron (1990 [1977]). Together, these practices can reproduce or challenge social inequalities without being acknowledged for doing so.

Absolute Other: Lacan's ‘Big Other’ as Adjunct to Critical Social Psychological Analysis?

AbstractLacanian theory offers a series of promising conceptualization – amongst then the notion of the ‘big Other’– which, despite their obvious analytical value, have been curiously neglected by critical social psychology. This paper concerns itself with an overview of this concept of the ‘big Other’ particularly in reference to how it may benefit critical social psychological analyses. The explanatory value of this notion is introduced via a series of Lacanian paradoxes (the Other as vanishing‐point of inter‐subjectivity that cannot itself be subjectivized; the Other as simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’; the Other as both embodiment of the social substance and yet also the site of the unconscious). I then move on to show how this notion opens conceptual opportunities for social psychological conceptualizations of the formation of the social. I close by demonstrating what the ‘big Other’ offers critical social psychological analyses of power.

Unconditional respect for persons: A social psychological analysis

It has been suggested that unconditional respect for persons, i.e. respect that is due to everyone simply as a function of their being persons, is the most fundamental kind of respect. Showing unconditional respect towards someone involves recognizing their integrity as a person and their status as an autonomous rational actor. This idea is a cornerstone of much moral, social and political theory. While the idea implicitly underlies some contemporary psychological work on respect, for the most part this fundamental moral orientation has been neglected in psychology. The concept needs clear explication and measurement if its explanatory and predictive value is to be fully realised. This paper will explore the concept of unconditional respect, describe a scale for measuring individual differences in this attitude, and then go on to position unconditional respect, both conceptually and empirically, amongst other relevant social psychological constructs such as Social Dominance Orientation, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Empathy and Perspective-taking. We then provide some evidence on, as well as speculation about, the role of unconditional respect in interpersonal and intergroup relations.

Narcissism and Neo-Liberalism : Work, Leisure, and Alienation in an Era of Consumption

The purpose of this paper is to trace some of the links between neo-liberalism, narcissism and the influence of work, leisure and consumer culture on self-identity. By examining narcissism as an instrument of personality and social psychological analysis, we investigate the ways in which self-identity in neo-liberal societies is constructed and fulfilled through interactions with the marketplace, promoting self-interest and success in the form of wealth, admiration and bodily perfection. It is our contention that this process creates narcissistic identities, which attempt to defend the self against the degradation of work in neo-liberal societies, and where anxiety, emptiness and isolation are converted into pleasure and healing through leisure consumerism. In the final analysis we explore some of the links between narcissistic work and leisure, and psychological distress and disorders.

A Social Psychological Analysis of Anomie Among National Football League Players

This exploratory study utilized a mixed-method approach to examine why some NFL players participate in deviant, and sometimes law-breaking, behavior and others do not. The qualitative findings in conjunction with Durkheimian theory provided the conceptualization of a quantitative instrument. Through a snowball sample, 104 NFL players were interviewed and surveyed. From the qualitative data, three core themes emerged: 1) deviance, 2) anomie, and 3) social ties. Within the study group, a substantial number of players had prior experience with deviant and illegal behaviors. It appeared that some level of anomie was present in a number of these players' lives. However, players that had strong ties to various social groups appeared less likely to succumb to anomie and deviance. Supporting the qualitative data, the quantitative findings revealed that anomie was one of the significant predictors of law-breaking players. It would therefore appear reasonable to suggest that some of the players were involved in behaviors that could be labeled anomic deviance. Furthermore, the findings supported the primacy of social ties/support in buffering anomie and deviance in the lives of NFL players in the study group.

Social psychological analyses of educational dynamics

Social psychological analyses of educational dynamics

The role of religious fundamentalism in terrorist violence: A social psychological analysis

This paper examines the social-psychological factors often implicated in discussions of terrorist violence/martyrdom, with a particular focus on the role of religion. We offer a brief description of the psychological theories underpinning terrorist research before focusing on social-psychological factors. The roles of psychopathology, irrationality and grievance/threat are examined, followed by empirical research on the beliefs which have been associated with the perpetration and support of terrorist violence, and the social factors which foster those beliefs, including social identity, socially carried interpretations, group leadership and individual differences. Although religion is not a single, simple causal factor in terrorist violence, religious elements often feature strongly in the belief systems associated with terrorist violence, and can also feature in other important fostering factors for terrorist violence, such as the use of rhetoric. Finally, the status of lay explanations of terrorist violence, focusing on the role of religious fundamentalism is examined.

A Nation of Immigrants: Living Our Legacy

Immigration is a social issue of global importance. Understanding immigration patterns and trends requires paying attention to historical trends, demographic patterns, public policy developments, and cultural attitudes and beliefs. In this article I call for an intensified social psychological analysis of immigration, using Pettigrew's (1997) three‐level framework as a means to define the approach. Selected research examples build the case for the critical role that social psychology can play in understanding the individual, group, and intergroup dynamics of immigration.

Representations sociales et triangulation: une application en psychologie sociale de la sante

La relation du contexte social et de la santé représente un enjeu de recherche important pour les développements actuels en psychologie sociale de la santé. L'approche des représentations sociales offre un cadre d'analyse de la pensée sociale profane concernant la maladie, en rupture avec la tradition cognitiviste et individualiste dominante dans les analyses psychosociales des risques sanitaires. Sur le plan théorico-méthodologique, cette approche permet une étude contextualisée des processus sociocognitifs qui interviennent dans la construction des risques, en opérationnalisant la double nature, produit/processus, de la représentation. Dans cette perspective, la triangulation en tant que stratégie de recherche inductive constitue une démarche privilégiée. Nous présentons une application de cette stratégie à travers une recherche sur les représentations des relations sexuelles et des risques liés au sida chez de jeunes adultes en France et en Grèce. Nous discutons la pertinence de la triangulation pour les approches "multi-niveaux" de la construction des risquesl.

Men's Heterosexual Initiation: Sexual Agency and Empowerment in Post-World War II American Culture

Scholars suggest that heterosexual initiation is a social process that inhibits women yet entitles men to shape and control the pace and practices within sexual interaction. Radical feminists in particular have successfully detailed the patriarchal organization within the institution of heterosexuality. Yet their critical insights have tended to neglect or minimize the changing contours of the sexual landscape as well as the question of what exactly makes men's sexual agency patriarchal. Studying 60 white, non-Hispanic, middle-class men from Philadelphia, this article highlights the possible conditions for men to assert various patriarchal configurations of sexual agency in post-World War II American culture during initial forays into heterosexuality. The social psychological analysis suggests that younger men perceive women today as the symbolic keepers of masculine sexual standards, enabling them to judge sexual performances through their previous experiences with other men. While men appear more aware ...

The Limits of Demographic Categories and the Politics of the 2004 Presidential Election

This study looked at responses to the Iraq War in a nationwide sample of college students. The study focused mainly on the role of sex, religiosity, and the location of the school in a “red” or “blue” state. It also looked at a number of other psychological variables, including some related to cognitive competence. Support for the war was measured by an instrument comprising two independent factors—“patriotic militancy” and “internationalism.” As expected, support for the war in Iraq was significantly higher among students who considered themselves religiously involved than among students who rated themselves as more secular. Predicted sex differences in attitudes about the war were not found. However, several measures of cognitive competence including grade point average were significantly associated with less favorable attitudes toward the war. As expected from the election results later that year, students from “red” states were more supportive of the war than students from “blue” states. However, these effects appear to be due to a confound between religious affiliation and religiosity. The results are explained in terms of political rhetoric that focused on religious values as well as on the reduced importance of feminism as an ideological stance. They are discussed in terms of the need for a more social psychological analysis of political attitudes and behaviors that takes into account contextual factors and the transformation of demographic categories into meaningful psychological variables.