Individual-Society Dualism is the most enduring
theme in social psychology, but it’s a
problem. It’s social psychology’s biggest
problem maybe. 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 recognising 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 are either due to individuals or
due 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’s 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
that
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 where 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.
