Originally published in 1988, this book asks the question, how does the political system affect the behaviour of individuals? Donald Granberg and Soren Holmberg use long-term cross-sectional and panel national surveys of electorates in two very different democratic systems - Sweden and the United States - to examine an issue that has implications for our understanding of both social and psychological processes and also political systems in general. Their interdisciplinary and comparative survey considers such topics as ideological perception of abstract and concrete issues at the party and...

Originally published in 1991, this study examines the views of politics presented by young people in contemporary Britain. Bhavnani argues that previous studies of youth and youth culture were limited by too great a reliance on simple survey techniques, and by lack of attention to conceptions of politics amongst young people, and to politics as a series of lived relationships rather than a set of external objects. Instead, she uses ethnographic approaches and open-response interviewing within the broad theoretical framework of social representations. The political is taken to refer to the...

This book examines the nature and operation of social thought and language as used in everyday life, and looks at social thinking through the complex patternings and functions of discourse. It is based on extensive empirical evidence about the language of contemporary racism and nationalism, drawn from the vast corpus of the discourse of Swiss racism gathered by the author from a variety of written and spoken sources. Three principal investigations, of sociocentrism, causality and the perception of time, are used to sinuate and define the nature and working of everyday speech and reasoning....

The aim of this book, first published in 1991, is not to examine the moral or economic rights and wrongs of the issue, but to introduce a fresh way of exploring this old but growing problem. Research into tax evasion has been bedevilled with measurement problems: the hidden economy has been well named. The key is to design experimental situations that engage the same psychological processes as their real-world counterparts. This has been achieved by embedding the declaration of taxes in simulated business games. A feature of the research is that it is cross-national (carried out in the...

This book, first published in 1987, looks at the processes and spread of social innovation: the mechanisms of this innovation are rooted in the conflict that minorities are capable of creating in others and introducing into the social system. These innovations give rise to rejection, discrimination and denial of the minority group. However, minority ideas take root and gradually new norms replace the old ones. Despite the denial, therefore, the marginal standpoint of minority groups can have an impact on the belief systems and behaviour patterns of other individuals. This book proposes a...

Advertising, materialism and consumption are central aspects of contemporary Western culture. We are bombarded with idealised images of the perfect body, desirable consumer goods, and affluent lifestyles, yet psychology is only just beginning to take account of the profound influence these consumer culture ideals have on individuals' sense of identity and worth.

Consumer Culture, Identity, and Well-Being documents the negative psychological impact consumer culture can have on how individuals view themselves and on their emotional welfare. It looks at the social...

This 1991 book addresses the question of stability and change in our concepts of ourselves. The self is described as part of an ecological system, seen as a conjunction of other people, environments and objects. These serve as the sources and settings, instruments and symbols of social experience. The external elements of the ecological system are reflected in self-related cognitions: so long as the ecology of the self is stable, the self-concept will likewise achieve stability. Self-concept change, therefore, can be studied from the point of view of change in the relationship between person...

Responsibility and accountability are the issues at the heart of this book. An account episode, according to Professor Schonbach's conception, is a four-phase interaction between an actor and an opponent. Account episodes occur in many different social settings; they are societal means for the resolution or diminution of conflicts engendered by failure events. Frequently, however, such episodes do not accomplish this goal but promote an escalation of the original conflict. The basic questions addressed in this book are under what circumstances an account episode is likely to be successful,...

This 1990 volume was written to re-examine the long-standing controversy about consistency in personality from a social psychological perspective. Barbara Krahe reconsiders the concept of consistency in terms of the systematic coherence of situation cognition and behaviour across situations. In the first part of the volume she undertakes an examination of social psychological models of situation cognition for their ability to clarify the principles underlying the perception of situational similarities. She then advances an individual-centred methodology in which nomothetic hypotheses about...

This 1986 study presents an insightful perspective on public attitudes towards the European Community. It contains a review of the findings from public opinion surveys of the time on this issue, but goes beyond straightforward description to provide a real understanding of European attitudes. A variety of social-psychological theories are used to test a model of the structure underlying Community attitudes. The original data reported in the present study parallel the findings from much larger, representative and long-term surveys of public opinion. Thus Miles Hewstone is able to derive from...