Teaching social psychology
It’s been almost eight years since I left my Illinois job in an interdisciplinary legal studies department and moved to Boston to do other things. This semester, though, I decided to teach introductory social psychology as an adjunct instructor at nearby Mount Ida College. So far it feels pretty good.
Although my doctorate is in social psychology, it’s been about 15 years since I last taught this course. My work in critical psychology and the interface of psychology, law, and justice are far from social psychology’s mainstream, but I remain interested in that mainstream’s subject matter despite the field’s disappointing assumptions and methods. When I leaf through a social psychology journal or wander through a convention poster session, the repetitive trivia leaves me numb. [is that what we’re still sending students off to!?!] But aggression, competition, altruism, authority, value change, propaganda, obedience, conformity — these and other standard topics remain crucial. For the most part, they are also inherently interesting to undergraduates willing to take the time to think about how their lives intertwine with others and with broader social institutions.
This isn’t a course in critical social psychology, so I feel obligated to expose students to the field’s traditional subject matter. I’m using Elliot Aronson’s text The Social Animal. Despite being embedded in social psychology’s liberal experimentalist core, Aronson at least tries to cut down on the field’s trivia and focus on the bigger picture. I try to add a more critical element through supplemental readings and my own in-class input, as I have in the past, but that past experience demonstrates that the standard course itself can be thought-provoking even on its own terms, especially if we focus more on the subject matter than on methodological details.
My website includes a long list of books and articles more or less relevant to social psychology, loosely defined, but the list is very much out of date. I haven’t been able to find an organized collection of current critical readings suitable for use as a supplement to a standard social psychology course. If you know of something like that, please let me know! If such a collection doesn’t exist, perhaps it’s time we came up with one.