Constructing Social Psychology: Creative and Critical Aspects

This collection of papers by William J. McGuire reports research on the phenomenal self, revealing how we selectively perceive ourselves and other complex stimuli in terms of distinctive or atypical features, often noticing what is missing rather than what is there. The content, structure, and processing of thought systems surrounding the self and other complex stimuli are shown to function by balancing logical consistency, realistic coping, and hedonic gratification. Attitude change and social influence processes are described, with particular attention given to the personality correlates of persuasability, how beliefs can be immunized against persuasion, how persuasive communications affect beliefs, and how people can be persuaded by Socratic questioning that does not give them new information but rather directs their attention to information they already have. Also reported are findings on language and thought, psychology and history, and techniques of creative thinking in psychology and other fields.

• Book focuses on person’s phenomenal conscious experience, whereas most social psychology focuses on external behavior • Focuses on the creative process of generating hypotheses rather than critical processes of generating hypotheses • In contrast to usual studies of relations in isolation, in this book there is more study of relations in their natural embeddedness, as functioning with a broader system

1. Learning my way; 2. Immunization against persuasion; 3. Attitude change studies; 4. Analyzing social influence processes; 5. Developing effective persuasion campaigns; 6. Thought systems: their contents, structure and functioning; 7. Topography of the phenomenal self; 8. Distinctiveness theory and the salience of self-characteristics; 9. Language and thought asymmetries; 10. Psychology and history; 11. Winters of our discontents: crises in social psychology; 12. A perspectivist epistemology: knowledge as misrepresentation.