| Kommentar |
The German Association for Language named "post-faktisch" (post-truth) its word of the year 2016. In Europe and the United States it has been a year of passionate, populist discourses in politics and social media in a climate of growing nationalist aggression. Fear of the ethnic "Other", fear of social excusion, aversion to "the establishment" and "our nation first" seem to be something less than the new Zeitgeist that is being used by political parties, movements and elected presidents in a battle between news and fake-news, between facts and - an astoninshing neologism - "alternative facts". So, is the rationalist paradigm obsolete? How can we grasp these daily realities and seek ways of rapprochement? And what is "truth" anyway?
„It´s the psychology, stupid!” one could paraphrase James Carville much cited remark. It is constructivism´s and social psychology´s premise that the inner workings of our minds and hearts heavily impact human relations, daily realities and our actions. Drawing on findings of psychoanalysis, evolutionary, cognitive, behavioural and neuropsycholgy social psychology illuminates the complex, sometimes evident, sometimes hidden mechanisms of individual and group experience.
Emotions, for instance, may function as prism for ideas, identities and beloning, they color human ties and can prompt people to commit brave or destructive actions. Collective beliefs, stereotypes and knowledge may heavily influence our perception of the world by motivating distortion, selection and bias. These mechanisms are even enhanced in intergroup relations: Experimental psychology proves that simply belonginig to a certain group motivates positive emotions and a positive bias in interpreting ingroups actions, while there is a negative bias towards outgroups and outgroup members.
Such and other processes based on social identity and social emotion theories may on an inter-communal and international level shed light on the origins and the evolution of coflicts and as such are precious for other disciplines, foremost for peace and conflict studies, international relations and the study of reconciliation.
Our course will be twofold: In the first part we will discuss central concepts of social psychology, such as norms, identities, emotions, attitudes, persuation, group dynamics and their interaction. In the second part be will discuss how these concepts impact peace and conflict within national and international relations. This will include the fields of ethnonationalism, collective memory, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, intractable conflicts and reconcliation. Thus, studens will get a profound and broad overview of the role of social psychology for understanding inter-human and international relations.
There will be no oral presentations. Our course will be based on small homework tasks to be shortly presented in every class, on group work, social psychological experiments and in-depth discussion of the literature.
Everyone who wants to attend this course is EXPECTED TO READ ALL TEXTS FOR EVERY SESSION AND PREPARE THE RESPECTIVE TASKS, so an informed discussion can evolve. |
