A combination of COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY and SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY which emerged in the 1960s. Seen as part of the COGNITIVE REVOLUTION but with much older roots in GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY. Principally concerned with our INFORMATION PROCESSING and how we use it with the minimum expenditure of cognitive effort to make sense of our social environment and our social behaviour. This includes our ATTRIBUTION of social behaviour and causality, the way we STEREOTYPE people and our use of HEURISTICS.

A series of recorded tests of musical abilities developed by the American psychologist Carl Seashore.

The study of social systems and CULTURES in different societies, particularly non-literate societies.

Link to see collective consciousness needs to be fixed. feelings, patterns of thought, and fragments of experience that have been transmitted from generation to generation in all humans and have deeply influenced the mind and behavior.

 Also see COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS.

An anthropological term denoting a biological sub-division of human beings with a common genetic ancestry. This common ancestry produces common physical characteristics such as skin colour, facial structure and size. There is no such thing as a pure race; every physical characteristic can be found, however infrequently, in every large human subgroup. It is suggested from time to time that a particular minority subgroup is inferior in INTELLIGENCE to the majority subgroup. At the beginning of this century it was Jews; more recently it has been Blacks. There has never been any clear evidence for this viewpoint and a lot of evidence against it. Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that there was a pure race and that INTELLIGENCE TESTS measured intelligence, those tests remain educationally, culturally and socially biased against ethnic minority groups.

In EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, the random selection of subjects for an EXPERIMENTAL GROUP, or the random presentation of stimuli to the subjects in the EXPERIMENT This is done so that all individual factors are evened out and will not affect the experimental results.

See DYNAMIC PSYCHOLOGY.

The Greek term for the life force; translated first as ‘soul’ then as ‘MIND’ and now sometimes as ‘SELF’.

The theory that, other things being equal, the first one of a series to be learned is remembered best. Compare with RECENCY EFFECT.

Research methods which are concerned more with the precision and generalisabilily of the data being collected than their richness of content i.e. having a narrower but sharper focus than QUALITATIVE METHODS. The EXPERIMENT and the structured questionnaire are the most common examples in psychological research.