2 - Context and social cognition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2009
Summary
Introduction: social psychological dimensions of context
Contexts defined as mental models of social situations of communication are in many ways interfaces between discourse and society. If there is one discipline that studies the relations between people, their conduct and society it is social psychology. I shall therefore explore in this chapter some of the contributions that social psychology has made, or could make, to the study of context. For instance, social psychology has for decades studied the ways various properties of the social situation influence people's “behavior,” and has proposed several taxonomies for the structure of such situations that may be relevant for our theory of context.
As is the case for many other disciplines, social psychology is hardly a systematic, well-organized body of knowledge about the relations between people and society, but rather a loose community of many different research groups interested in topics such as those summarized by the following keywords:
accommodation, action, affect, affiliation, aggression, altruism, attitudes, attraction, attribution, authoritarianism, behavior, beliefs, categorization, cognitive dissonance, collective behavior, communication, compliance, conflict, conformity, consensus, cooperation, crime, crowds, deviance, discrimination, emotions, frustration, gender, groups, identity, impressions, influence, ingroups, interaction, intergroup relations, interpersonal relations, judgments, labeling, language, leadership, love, norms, obedience, outgroups, personality, persuasion, power, prejudice, propaganda, roles, self, self-categorization, self-esteem, social cognition, social movements, social representations, socialization, speech, status, stereotypes, values.
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- Society and DiscourseHow Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk, pp. 29 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009