These study notes provide a focused, exam-ready guide to the core concepts, debates, and critical perspectives commonly covered in PSY 201 Social Psychology at Rhodes University. The emphasis falls on both classic social psychology and the critical approaches that question how power, history, identity, and context shape psychological life. The notes are designed to support revision, essay planning, and application to South African social realities.
1. Foundations of Social Psychology
Social psychology examines how people think, feel, and act in relation to others, but it does so with a crucial difference from common-sense explanations: it treats behaviour as shaped by social context rather than arising only from individual personality. In an exam context, this means demonstrating not just that people influence one another, but how norms, roles, group membership, institutions, and culture structure social life. At Rhodes University, this often connects with critical traditions that challenge narrow, individualistic explanations and ask who benefits from particular social arrangements.
What Social Psychology Studies
At its most basic, social psychology explores the interplay between the individual and the social world. Rather than viewing people as isolated units, it asks how perception, memory, emotion, identity, and behaviour are influenced by the presence—real, imagined, or implied—of other people. Common topics include:
- Social cognition: how people interpret others and make sense of social events
- Attitudes and persuasion: how beliefs and evaluations are formed and changed
- Conformity and obedience: how social pressure shapes behaviour
- Prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination: how group distinctions become socially meaningful
- Intergroup relations: how in-group and out-group dynamics affect conflict and cooperation
- Self and identity: how people understand who they are in social settings
- Prosocial and aggressive behaviour: why people help, harm, or ignore others
A strong exam answer usually begins by defining social psychology as the study of how the social environment influences thought and behaviour, then immediately adds that critical social psychology questions the assumption that the self is naturally separate from society.
Core Assumptions of Mainstream Social Psychology
Traditional or mainstream social psychology often rests on several assumptions:
- Individuals are analysable as discrete decision-makers.
- Social behaviour can be measured, predicted, and explained through empirical research.
- Internal mental states such as attitudes or beliefs are central causes of action.
- Behaviour is influenced by situational forces, but these can be identified through experimental control.
This approach has strengths. It allows clear hypotheses, replicable studies, and practical applications. For example, research on conformity, persuasion, and group influence has been used in education, advertising, and public health campaigns. However, critical psychologists argue that this tradition often overstates universality and underestimates power, language, history, and ideology.
Classic Questions in the Discipline
A useful way to revise is to treat social psychology as answering five recurring questions:
| Question | Typical focus | Example exam angle |
|---|---|---|
| How do people perceive others? | Attribution, social cognition, impression formation | Why do we blame individuals rather than systems? |
| How do attitudes influence action? | Persuasion, consistency, dissonance | Why do people say one thing and do another? |
| How do groups influence behaviour? | Norms, conformity, roles, obedience | Why do ordinary people follow harmful orders? |
| How do identities shape behaviour? | Self-concept, social identity, belonging | Why do group memberships matter in politics? |
| How do power and inequality operate? | Prejudice, discrimination, ideology, oppression | How are social categories linked to domination? |
This table is useful because it shows the move from simple description to critical analysis. In an exam, linking these questions to South African issues such as race, language, class, gender, and institutional power often strengthens the answer.
The Importance of Context
One of the central lessons of social psychology is that behaviour changes with context. The same person may act differently in a lecture hall, family gathering, protest march, or online space. Context includes:
- Physical setting: space, crowding, visibility, privacy
- Social norms: expectations about appropriate behaviour
- Roles: student, parent, employee, citizen, activist
- Power relations: who can sanction, exclude, reward, or silence others
- Historical conditions: apartheid legacies, inequality, economic precarity, protest culture
- Cultural meanings: values, language, collective memory
This matters in South Africa because social life is deeply shaped by historical inequality and ongoing structural differences. A purely individualistic account of social behaviour would miss why trust, status, belonging, or conflict may be differently experienced across communities.
Why Critical Perspectives Matter
Critical perspectives argue that social psychology should not merely describe behaviour; it should examine how psychological knowledge itself may reproduce social power. For example, if a study treats poverty only as a matter of poor motivation, it obscures structural unemployment, unequal schooling, and spatial inequality. If racism is studied only as individual prejudice, the analysis misses institutional discrimination and the historical production of racial categories.
Critical social psychology therefore asks:
- Whose interests are served by a particular explanation?
- What assumptions about normality, intelligence, or rationality are built into theory?
- How do language and discourse construct social reality?
- How are subjects produced through institutions such as schools, clinics, prisons, and universities?
These are not abstract concerns. They affect how social problems are understood and addressed. A critical lens does not reject empirical work; rather, it demands that empirical work be historically grounded, politically aware, and ethically self-reflective.
2. Social Cognition, Attribution, and the Construction of Meaning
Social cognition refers to the mental processes involved in understanding the social world. People do not respond to events as passive recorders; they interpret, categorise, infer, and evaluate. Critical study requires understanding both the standard cognitive account and its limitations. In exam answers, attribution theory, heuristics, schemas, and self-serving explanations often appear together because they explain how people make sense of behaviour.
Attribution Theory
Attribution theory asks how people explain causes of behaviour. When someone arrives late, we might think they are careless, stuck in traffic, or delayed by responsibilities. These explanations vary along two main dimensions:
- Internal attribution: behaviour is caused by personality, motives, or dispositions
- External attribution: behaviour is caused by situational factors, context, or constraints
A classic error in everyday thinking is the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to overestimate internal causes and underestimate situational ones when explaining others’ behaviour. For example, a lecturer might view a student’s silence as lack of preparation rather than anxiety, language difficulty, or cultural norms around speaking in class.
Key attribution concepts
- Consistency: does the person behave the same way across time?
- Distinctiveness: does the behaviour occur only in this situation?
- Consensus: do others behave similarly in this situation?
- Locus of causality: is the cause internal or external?
- Stability: is the cause likely to persist?
- Controllability: can the cause be changed?
These dimensions are useful for exam explanation because they show how people build causal stories. Yet critical psychology warns that attribution processes are not purely neutral. The way causes are assigned often reflects social power. Privileged groups may interpret their success as deserved and others’ struggles as personal failure, which can naturalise inequality.
Heuristics and Cognitive Shortcuts
People cannot process every social detail carefully all the time, so they rely on cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics. These are efficient but can be biased.
Common heuristics include:
- Availability heuristic: judging frequency or likelihood by how easily examples come to mind
- Representativeness heuristic: judging something by how closely it matches a stereotype or prototype
- Anchoring and adjustment: relying too heavily on an initial value
- Confirmation bias: favouring information that confirms existing beliefs
In social settings, heuristics matter because they shape stereotyping, risk perception, and political judgement. For instance, a highly publicised crime may lead people to overestimate crime rates because vivid examples are easy to recall. This has consequences for public opinion and policy support.
Schemas and Social Knowledge
A schema is a mental framework used to organise information. Schemas help people recognise patterns, predict events, and navigate everyday life. There are several types:
- Person schemas: expectations about individuals or personality types
- Role schemas: expectations about social roles such as teacher, doctor, or parent
- Self-schemas: beliefs about one’s own identity
- Event schemas or scripts: expectations about sequences of action, such as ordering food or attending a ceremony
Schemas are useful because they reduce complexity. However, they also create distortions. If a student has a schema that “quiet people are less intelligent,” they may misjudge classmates who are reflective or culturally reserved. Schemas can harden into stereotypes when applied to social groups. Once a stereotype is activated, people often notice confirming evidence and ignore disconfirming evidence.
Social Categorisation
People organise the social world by categorising others into groups. Categorisation simplifies decision-making but also contributes to in-group bias. Once a category becomes meaningful, people often exaggerate similarities within groups and differences between groups. Categories can be based on:
- race
- gender
- nationality
- language
- class
- religion
- age
- sexuality
- occupation
In South African contexts, categorisation has profound historical weight because categories such as “Black,” “White,” “Coloured,” and “Indian” were institutionalised through apartheid. Even after legal apartheid ended, these categories continue to shape lived experience, access to resources, and social expectations. A critical approach asks not only how categorisation works cognitively but how it is produced and maintained by institutions and discourse.
Impression Formation
Impression formation concerns how people quickly form views of others. First impressions often rely on limited cues such as appearance, speech, dress, and body language. Two important ideas are:
- Primacy effect: early information has a strong influence on overall judgement
- Recency effect: later information may dominate when initial impressions are weak or new
- Halo effect: one positive trait leads to favourable judgements of unrelated traits
- Horn effect: one negative trait leads to unfavourable judgements of unrelated traits
These effects matter in classrooms, workplaces, and interviews. For example, a confident speaker may be judged as more competent than a quieter but equally capable person. Critical psychology highlights how such judgements can reproduce privilege because confidence, accent, dress, and mannerisms are socially patterned.
Attribution and Inequality
A major critical issue is that attribution processes often individualise structural problems. Consider unemployment. A mainstream explanation might focus on lack of effort, poor planning, or insufficient skills. A critical explanation would also examine:
- historical exclusion from quality education
- spatial inequality and transport costs
- labour market segmentation
- racialised access to networks
- economic policy and structural unemployment
Both levels matter, but only the critical level reveals how social systems produce patterned disadvantage. Exam answers are strongest when they show that psychological explanations are not false, but incomplete if separated from the social and political conditions that shape them.
3. Attitudes, Persuasion, Conformity, and Obedience
This section is central for exam revision because it connects individual beliefs to group influence and power. Attitudes are not merely private opinions; they are socially formed, communicatively shaped, and often tied to identity and ideology. Conformity and obedience reveal how people adapt to social pressure, sometimes in ways that support harmful systems.
Attitudes: Structure and Function
An attitude is a learned evaluation of an object, person, group, issue, or event. It typically has three components:
- Cognitive: beliefs or thoughts
- Affective: feelings or emotions
- Behavioural: intended or actual action
These components do not always align. A person may believe smoking is harmful, dislike it emotionally, yet still smoke due to habit, stress, or social context. This inconsistency is important because it shows that attitudes do not automatically predict behaviour.
Functions of attitudes
Attitudes can serve several functions:
- Knowledge function: help organise experience
- Instrumental function: support reward-seeking and punishment avoidance
- Ego-defensive function: protect self-esteem from threat
- Value-expressive function: express central values and identity
- Social-adjustive function: help fit in with a group
These functions explain why people resist changing certain attitudes. If an attitude is tied to identity or belonging, changing it may feel like social rejection.
Persuasion
Persuasion is the process by which attitudes are changed through communication. One widely used framework is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which distinguishes between two routes:
- Central route: careful thinking about the quality of arguments
- Peripheral route: reliance on cues such as attractiveness, credibility, emotion, or repetition
The central route is more likely when people are motivated and able to process information. The peripheral route is more likely when attention is low or the issue seems unimportant. A public health campaign about vaccination, for example, may use strong evidence for some audiences while also using trusted messengers, clear design, and emotional framing for others.
Factors affecting persuasion
- Source credibility: expertise and trustworthiness
- Source attractiveness: likability or social appeal
- Message quality: strength, logic, and evidence
- Emotional appeal: fear, hope, guilt, pride
- Audience characteristics: prior beliefs, involvement, mood
- Repetition: repeated exposure can increase familiarity and acceptance
- Two-sided messaging: acknowledging objections may increase trust
Critical perspectives caution that persuasion is often embedded in power relations. Advertising, political campaigns, and institutional communication do not merely inform; they shape desire, normativity, and consent. Thus the study of persuasion should include ideology and media power, not just message variables.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort experienced when a person holds contradictory beliefs or when behaviour conflicts with beliefs. People are motivated to reduce this discomfort by changing either their beliefs, behaviour, or perception of the situation.
Examples:
- A student who values honesty but cheats on an assignment may justify the act as necessary due to overload.
- A person who cares about the environment but drives a fuel-heavy vehicle may minimise the impact of their individual choices or emphasise structural barriers.
The importance of dissonance theory lies in showing that people actively manage inconsistency. This can lead to rationalisation, denial, or attitude change. It also helps explain why people sometimes defend institutions or practices they privately doubt: acknowledging conflict can threaten identity or belonging.
Conformity
Conformity is the tendency to align attitudes, beliefs, or behaviour with group norms. Conformity can arise from different motivations:
- Normative influence: wanting social approval or avoiding rejection
- Informational influence: believing others may be correct, especially in ambiguous situations
A classic feature of conformity is that people may publicly agree while privately disagreeing. This distinction matters because social behaviour can conceal private judgement.
Everyday examples of conformity
- Wearing particular clothing styles to fit in
- Using slang or speech patterns common in a peer group
- Agreeing with a dominant opinion in a tutorial to avoid embarrassment
- Following family or community expectations about gender roles
Conformity is not always negative. It enables coordination, shared norms, and cooperation. Yet harmful conformity can support racism, sexism, bullying, corruption, or silence in the face of injustice.
Obedience
Obedience occurs when behaviour is shaped by direct orders from an authority figure. Obedience matters because it reveals how ordinary people may participate in harmful systems. The key insight is that authority is socially constructed: people often comply because they recognise the legitimacy of the source and fear sanctions.
Factors associated with obedience include:
- perceived legitimacy of authority
- closeness of authority figure
- gradual escalation of demands
- diffusion of responsibility
- institutional settings that normalise compliance
- dehumanisation of targets
Critical reflection on obedience
A purely individual explanation might ask, “Why did that person obey?” Critical analysis asks, “What institutions, discourses, and power relations make obedience appear reasonable or necessary?” This is especially relevant in contexts such as policing, militarised institutions, bureaucracies, and workplaces where hierarchy is strong. Obedience may not be a sign of weak character; it may reflect a social environment in which disobedience is costly and legitimacy is routinely produced.
Conformity and Obedience in South African Contexts
South African social life provides rich examples of these processes. Conformity can appear in language use, dress, classroom participation, and political loyalty. Obedience may be shaped by respect for elders, institutional hierarchy, workplace authority, or state power. At the same time, protest movements, student activism, and community resistance demonstrate that conformity is never total. People negotiate norms strategically, sometimes complying in one setting while resisting in another.
Exam answers benefit from showing that conformity and obedience are not simply weaknesses to be overcome; they are social mechanisms that can stabilize or challenge systems depending on the norms and authorities involved.
4. Groups, Identity, Prejudice, and Intergroup Relations
Groups are central to social psychology because people define themselves through membership, belonging, and difference. Group processes influence self-esteem, behaviour, conflict, and solidarity. In critical perspective, groups are not only psychological categories but historical and political formations shaped by power, exclusion, and inequality.
Social Identity
Social identity refers to the part of the self derived from group memberships. People belong to many groups at once, and these memberships become more or less salient depending on context. A person may identify as a student, sibling, woman, church member, activist, or athlete, and each identity may guide different behaviours.
Social identity matters because it affects:
- self-esteem
- belonging
- norms
- group loyalty
- perceptions of similarity and difference
When a group identity is valued, members may feel pride and protection. When it is devalued, members may experience shame, stigma, or resistance. Social identity is therefore deeply tied to social status and recognition.
In-Groups and Out-Groups
An in-group is a group with which a person identifies. An out-group is a group to which they do not belong. Group membership often produces in-group bias, meaning a tendency to favour one’s own group. This can show up in:
- more positive evaluations of in-group members
- assumptions of similarity within the in-group
- harsher judgement of out-group members
- stronger trust and cooperation within the group
In-group bias does not always lead to overt hostility, but it can create subtle patterns of exclusion. For example, peer networks may reproduce class privilege by helping insiders access opportunities. In university settings, students may cluster by language, race, religion, or social background, reinforcing boundaries even without explicit discrimination.
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
These concepts are closely related but distinct:
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Stereotype | A belief or generalisation about a group | “All first-year students are careless” |
| Prejudice | A negative attitude or feeling toward a group | Resentment or fear of a particular group |
| Discrimination | Unfair behaviour toward a group | Denying opportunities or treating people unequally |
Stereotypes may be positive, negative, or mixed, but they are problematic because they simplify identities and ignore individual variation. Prejudice involves emotion and evaluation, while discrimination is behavioural and structural. A person can hold stereotypes without acting on them, but stereotypes often inform prejudice and discriminatory practice.
Theories of Prejudice
Several theories help explain prejudice:
1. Realistic Conflict Theory
Prejudice emerges from competition over scarce resources such as jobs, land, status, or political power. When groups perceive a threat to their interests, hostility increases.
2. Social Identity Theory
People derive self-esteem from group membership and thus favour their in-group. Prejudice may emerge even without material competition because people seek positive distinctiveness.
3. Scapegoating
When frustration cannot be directed at its real source, it may be displaced onto a vulnerable group.
4. Authoritarianism
Some individuals or social environments encourage strong submission to authority and hostility toward perceived deviants.
5. Socialisation and ideology
Prejudice is learned through family, media, schooling, and cultural narratives that normalise hierarchies.
A critical perspective prefers explanations that connect prejudice to wider systems of power. For instance, racist belief is not only a personal bias; it is sustained by historical narratives, institutional arrangements, and media representations.
The Contact Hypothesis
The contact hypothesis suggests that under appropriate conditions, interaction between groups can reduce prejudice. The best conditions usually include:
- equal status between groups
- common goals
- cooperative interaction
- institutional support
This idea is influential because it offers a practical route to reducing conflict. However, contact alone is not enough. If power inequality remains, or if contact is superficial, it may leave prejudice intact or even intensify it. For example, forced contact in unequal settings can reproduce frustration and resentment rather than mutual understanding. Critical evaluation is therefore essential: contact works best when structural conditions support equality and shared purpose.
Intersectionality and Identity
Critical social psychology often uses intersectionality to show that identity categories overlap. People are not simply “race” or “gender” or “class”; they occupy positions where these categories interact. For example, a Black woman may experience sexism and racism not as separate issues but as mutually shaping forms of inequality. Similarly, a queer student from a rural working-class background may face forms of exclusion that differ from those encountered by a wealthy urban peer.
Intersectional analysis is especially important in South African contexts where colonialism and apartheid produced layered inequalities that continue through class, race, gender, language, disability, and geography. Exam answers should avoid treating groups as uniform. Instead, they should show how social categories create differentiated experiences within and across groups.
Identity, Belonging, and Resistance
Identity is not only about assimilation to group norms. It can also be a site of resistance. Marginalised groups may reject dominant stereotypes, create alternative narratives, and develop collective action. Student movements, women’s organisations, LGBTQ+ activism, and anti-racist mobilisation all show that social identity can support critique rather than conformity.
A strong exam discussion links identity to both oppression and agency. People are shaped by social categories, but they also interpret, contest, and transform those categories. That balance is central to critical social psychology.
5. Critical Perspectives, Power, and South African Applications
Critical social psychology asks what mainstream social psychology leaves out. It does not abandon psychological analysis; rather, it insists that psychological phenomena are always historically located, politically shaped, and discursively produced. This final section is especially important for Rhodes University because it aligns with the tradition of questioning how knowledge, power, and subjectivity are intertwined.
What Makes a Perspective “Critical”
A critical perspective typically includes several features:
- Focus on power: who has influence, who is silenced, who benefits
- Attention to history: social categories are produced over time
- Commitment to context: behaviour cannot be understood apart from social conditions
- Suspicion of neutrality: knowledge is never entirely value-free
- Interest in emancipation: psychology should help challenge oppression
This means critical psychology is not simply “being negative.” It is an analytical stance that asks how dominant explanations may conceal social domination. For example, an account of low academic performance that focuses only on individual motivation may obscure underfunded schools, hunger, transport barriers, and alienating institutional cultures.
Discourse and Constructionism
One major critical idea is that language does not merely describe reality; it helps construct it. A discourse is a socially organised way of talking, thinking, and representing the world. Discourses shape what can be said, what counts as normal, and who is seen as credible.
Examples:
- A discourse of “merit” may present inequality as fair outcomes of effort.
- A discourse of “risk” may frame certain neighbourhoods as inherently dangerous.
- A discourse of “development” may justify interventions without community control.
- A discourse of “professionalism” may privilege certain accents, hairstyles, or body styles.
From a constructionist view, categories like “responsible citizen,” “good student,” or “problem family” are not neutral facts. They are produced through social practices and institutional language. This is especially important in education, health, and social policy, where labels can shape treatment and expectation.
Power and Institutional Life
Power in critical social psychology is not only overt coercion. It also works through normalisation, surveillance, categorisation, and expertise. Institutions such as schools, clinics, courts, prisons, and universities shape how people understand themselves. They reward some identities and penalise others.
Consider a university context:
- Students who speak the dominant academic language fluently may be read as intelligent.
- Students with different accents may be unfairly judged.
- “Participation” may be defined in a way that suits extroverted cultural norms.
- Administrative rules may appear neutral while disproportionately burdening students with limited financial resources.
These are examples of structural power operating through everyday practice. A critical exam answer should explain that institutions do not just respond to human behaviour; they actively shape it.
The Individualisation of Social Problems
One of the strongest criticisms of mainstream psychology is that it often individualises social problems. Instead of asking how poverty is produced, it asks why poor people lack motivation. Instead of asking why racism persists in institutions, it asks why individuals hold biased attitudes. Instead of asking why gender violence is structurally tolerated, it asks why victims did not leave sooner.
This move is problematic because it shifts responsibility onto individuals while ignoring context. Critical psychology insists on connecting personal suffering to social conditions. The phrase “the personal is political” is useful here because it captures the idea that intimate experience is shaped by public structures.
South African Relevance
South Africa is a powerful context for critical social psychology because inequality, race, language, class, and gender are deeply entangled with historical and present-day structures. Several themes are especially relevant:
1. Apartheid legacies
Apartheid was not only a political system; it was a psychological and social ordering of space, labour, and identity. Its effects persist in residential segregation, unequal education, and differential access to resources.
2. Language and belonging
Language shapes access to knowledge and institutional legitimacy. In multilingual settings, some voices are treated as standard while others are marked as less formal or less intelligent.
3. Student life and transformation
Universities may promote transformation rhetorically while preserving exclusion through hidden curriculum, unequal support, and cultural norms. Students may feel pressure to assimilate to dominant academic styles rather than have their knowledge traditions recognised.
4. Gender and violence
Gender inequality is reproduced through norms, institutions, and everyday interaction. Critical analysis does not reduce violence to “bad individuals”; it examines social tolerance, power hierarchies, and economic dependency.
5. Class and precarity
Material inequality shapes mental health, academic participation, social confidence, and future prospects. A student without stable housing or food security cannot be understood through personality alone.
How to Answer Critical Essay Questions
A strong essay on critical social psychology often follows this pattern:
- Define the mainstream concept
- For example, prejudice as negative attitudes toward a group.
- Explain the critical challenge
- Show that prejudice is linked to power, history, and institutions.
- Use a South African example
- Race, language, gender, class, or university transformation.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations
- Mainstream approaches offer precision, but critical approaches offer depth.
- Conclude with synthesis
- The most convincing account integrates individual processes with structural conditions.
Common Exam Arguments and Counter-Arguments
It is useful to practise balanced argumentation.
Argument: Social psychology is mainly about the individual.
Counter-argument: Individual thought and behaviour are always socially organised, so isolating the individual distorts the phenomenon.
Argument: Experiments provide objective knowledge.
Counter-argument: Experiments are useful but may strip away context, power, and meaning, especially in socially complex environments.
Argument: Prejudice is mainly a matter of personal bias.
Counter-argument: Personal bias matters, but prejudice is also institutional, historical, and discursive.
Argument: Conformity is always bad.
Counter-argument: Conformity can support coordination and social order; the key issue is what norms are being followed.
Argument: Contact reduces prejudice automatically.
Counter-argument: Contact only reduces prejudice under conditions of equality, cooperation, and institutional support.
Final Integration for Revision
A high-quality PSY 201 answer should show that social psychology is not simply the study of “how people behave around others.” It is the study of how social reality is made intelligible through cognition, language, identity, normativity, and power. Critical perspectives deepen this by showing that many “psychological” problems are also political, historical, and institutional.
A concise way to remember the discipline is:
- Social cognition explains how people make sense of others
- Attitudes, persuasion, conformity, and obedience explain influence and compliance
- Group processes and identity explain belonging, bias, and intergroup conflict
- Critical perspectives explain how power, discourse, and history shape the very categories psychology uses
High-Yield Revision Checklist
Before an exam, make sure you can:
- define social psychology accurately
- distinguish internal and external attributions
- explain heuristics, schemas, and impression formation
- compare attitudes, prejudice, and discrimination
- describe conformity and obedience with examples
- explain social identity and in-group bias
- discuss contact hypothesis and its limitations
- define critical psychology, discourse, and constructionism
- connect theory to South African realities
- provide balanced arguments and evaluations in essay form
Last-Minute Essay Framing Phrases
These phrases are useful for polished exam writing:
- “This explanation is limited because it abstracts behaviour from its historical and institutional context.”
- “A critical perspective reveals that the issue is not only individual bias, but also structural power.”
- “Although the mainstream account is useful, it remains incomplete without attention to discourse and inequality.”
- “Social behaviour is best understood as produced at the intersection of cognition, identity, and social structure.”
- “The South African context makes visible the enduring effects of historically organised inequality.”
Taken together, these notes provide both the conceptual foundation and the critical depth needed for PSY 201 Social Psychology at Rhodes University. The most important habit for exam success is to move beyond definition into explanation, evaluation, and contextual application.
