Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology

Book excerpt: The `Stubborn Particulars' of Social Psychology gives students an alternative approach to social psychology which acknowledges the limits of shared understandings often imposed by class, race, culture, nationality, ethnicity, language and gender. Frances Cherry shows how the generation of hypotheses, experimental practice, the interpretation of results and the process of scientific communication itself are equally framed by historical and cutural context. She discusses how to begin to understand one's own biases and prejudices, and how we create and make sense of our own social psychology as an engaged social critic, rather than as some idealised `objective' scientist. The `Stubborn Particulars' of Social Psychology should be required reading for all social psychology students as an antidote to their course text.