Discursive social psychology: from attitudes to evaluative practices

This chapter reviews the major theoretical and methodological features of discursive social psychology, and illustrates the scope and nature of this approach through showing the way it can respecify the social psychology of attitudes. It reviews discourse research on attitude variability; it describes conversation analytic studies on the way evaluations are managed in interaction and shows how our understanding of political oratory can be improved; it discusses the way evaluations are bound up with broader, culturally defined, systems of discourse; it discusses the relation between assessments and factual accounts; and finally it shows how a discursive approach can rework notions of function, consistency, vested interest, and emotion. The aim of this chapter is to introduce a discursive approach to social psychology to people who are more familiar with the mainstream experimental social cognition tradition. After making some preliminary remarks about the history, aims and theory of discursive social psychology I will focus on what would traditionally be called the social psychology of attitudes. This topic has the virtue of being at the heart of social psychology for much of the century, and thus provides a familiar startpoint for anyone wishing to understand what is distinctive about the discursive approach, and how radical its respecification of traditional