Rich sticky notes
The earliest example of this approach is The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkl-Brunswick, Levinson and Sanford (1950), who proposed a specific set of personality characteristics (the ‘authoritarian personality’) to explain why some people were drawn to prejudiced and anti-democratic political beliefs, while others were not. Although there have been serious criticisms of the work of Adorno et al. (Christie, 1954; Christie and Cook, 1958; Stone, Lederer and Christie, 1993), there have also been some significant findings in this field of research. For example, it is often the case that those who score highly on the right-wing authoritarianism scale are more highly prejudiced towards out-groups and minorities (e.g. Altemeyer, 1981).
An individual’s developed, relatively stable, yet changeable orientation to engage in various collective, social-political, problem-solving behaviours spanning a range from low-risk, passive, and institutionalized acts to high-risk, active, and unconventional behaviours.
(Corning and Myers, 2002, p. 704)
Corning and Myers (2002) use the example of going to university, where people may enter new social environments and encounter activists, as an experience that could change people’s orientation towards activism.
In order to measure a person’s activism orientation, Corning and Myers developed the activism orientation scale (AOS, Corning and Myers, 2002). You can use the AOS to measure your own orientation towards activism, and to compare it to the activism orientation of others.
Politics almost always involves social groups. Think back to the 2016 USA election race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and see if you can list any social groups that you heard about in the coverage of their campaigns. You could be thinking about the different ways in which women and women’s groups were discussed and represented, or about how migrants and ethnic minorities were central to many debates. Or, you may be thinking about what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat, left or right wing, American and/or Mexican. These different social categories are a key part of politics. However, they also form an important part of people’s psychologies, contributing to their sense of self. For this reason, many social psychologists have long argued that the psychology of groups has much to offer in understanding political processes (Sindic and Condor, 2014).
Subsequent studies have led to the development of a general model of crowd behaviour: the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) (Drury and Reicher, 1999; Reicher, 2001; Stott and Drury, 1999; Stott and Reicher, 1998). The ESIM starts from the position that crowd events are typically intergroup encounters, and examines how the identity of a group may develop and change as a result of interactions between groups. For example, a crowd of protesters can become united and develop a shared ‘anti-police’ identity, when the police use coercive force that is perceived by protesters as illegitimate and wrong (Reicher, 1996; Reicher and Haslam, 2011; Stott and Reicher, 1998; Stott and Drury, 2000). According to this perspective, the interaction between protesters and the police can explain what turns a crowd from peaceful to conflictual.
Social psychologists working in this field are interested in discourses like this because the ways the social world is constructed can have very real social consequences, such as justifying the exclusion of some people from housing in the above example. They also tell us something about how the social world works, e.g. what is considered to be ‘common-sense’ and how these assumptions may change or be contested in different contexts. In other words, this approach helps to understand the politics of common sense, that is, the ways that some constructions become dominant but also how they might be challenged. Relevant research includes studies on how issues like race, immigration, refugees, asylum seekers, terrorism, climate change and war, are constructed in political debates (e.g. De Castella and McGarty, 2011; Every and Augoustinos, 2007; Kurz, Augoustinos, and Crabb, 2010; Tileagă, 2009), and also how these issues are understood by ‘lay’ people in everyday life (e.g. Figgou and Condor, 2007; Gibson and Hamilton, 2011; Andreouli, Greenland and Howarth, 2016).