Social Psychology and Language Workshop

Workshop description 

Contemporary social psychology increasingly emphasises language as a critical factor  in  shaping, expressing, transmitting and sustaining personal  and cultural beliefs. Language is also a topic that links social psychology to a very wide range of science and humanities fields because it is a good candidate for the most distinctly human way that minds and societies make each other up day-to-day.

Language is also embedded in most of the measurement  instruments  that  social psychologists  use, such as questionnaire items, and social psychologists disagree about the extent to which language shapes the construction of reality when variables are measured. Our focus on language ranges from the basic social psychological kinds communicated by grammatical forms to the roles that language plays in the communication of prejudice (Carnaghi, Maass, Gresta, Bianchi, Cadinu, & Arcuri, 2008; Fasoli, Paladino, Carnaghi, Jetten, Batian, & Bain, 2016; Formanowicz, Roessel, Maass, & Suitner, 2017).  

This workshop will be an advanced introduction to the intersection of language studies with social psychology, will consider both the current state of knowledge and challenges of the field, and will empower students to consider and to implement a range of different methodologies in their research.