Open University DD307 – Revision Notes Index (2011)
Book 1 – Social Psychology Matters
Chapter 1 – Social psychology: past and present (20-12-2010)
Chapter 2 – Methods and knowledge in social psychology (29-12-2010, corrected 08-01-2011)
Chapter 3 – Families (22-01-2011)
Chapter 4 – Emotion (06-02-2011)
Chapter 5 – Self (08-03-2011)
Chapter 6 – Prejudice, conflict and conflict reduction (16-07-2011)
Chapter 7 – Embodiment (06-09-2011) and A3 size mind map (28-09-2011, corrected 06-10-2011)
Chapter 8 – Conclusion: social psychology matters
Book 2 – Critical Readings in Social Psychology
Chapter 1 – Introduction (30-12-2010)
Chapter 2 – Close relationships
Chapter 3 – Attitudes (16-04-2011) and A3 size mind map (19-09-2011)
Chapter 4 – The fundamental attribution error (05-09-2011)
Chapter 5 – Intragroup processes: entitativity (Updated 26-09-2011 – thanks Sam!)
Chapter 6 – Intergroup processes: social identity theory (17-09-2011)
Chapter 7 – Bystander intervention (08-09-2011)
Chapter 8 – Individual differences
Chapter 9 – Conclusion
Blog posts
All of my blog posts relating to the 2011 presentation of DD307 can be found here: http://www.tenpencepiece.net/blog/tag/dd307/
Hi Jane,
I’m only just catching up with my blog and emails from this week!
Epistemology is ‘what counts as knowledge’ – i.e. each of the four perspectives have a different view of what social psychological knowledge is and should be. So the cognitive social (experimental) approach argues that valid knowledge is general and universal laws of human behaviour (in the same way that a physicist seeks out universal laws concerning the behaviour of matter). The phenomenological perspective seeks out conscious meaning from lived experience, whereas the social psyhcoanalytical looks for unconscious meanings and motivations. Finally, the discursive approach counts what is socially constructed through language between people as knowledge.
As each of the four epistemologies are different, then it means that not only what counts as knowledge is different, but is has an impact on what questions can be asked and answered and how. For example, you’d never see a social psychoanalyitcal practitioner justify their conclusions in terms of statistical significance; an experimental social psychologist wouldn’t appeal to explanations of their results in terms of unconscious motivations that have been introjected into the psyche during childhood.
Tim – that’s brilliant! Thank you. I’ve now got the concept of epistemology – it was too amorphous for me before but now you’ve related it to each of the perspectives – I’ve got it!
Many thanks
Jane